
JUJIU I IIUJ I I i I WiBS— W 



P. L. 123 



a P O 9 — 1466 



Letters from America 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2010 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



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Letters from America 
by Rupert Brooke. 

With a Preface by Henry James 



New York : Charles Scribner's Sons 
597-599 Fifth Avenue. 1916 



^ • A >*'' ^' 



• O 



Copyright, 1916, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published January, 1916 






O 



V.:5 



0. O. PUBLIC LIBBulB^ 



285374 

,t:;>-**' Note 

jj^::! The author started in May 1913 on a journey to the 

United States, Canada, and the South Seas, from 

which he returned next year at the beginning of 

June. The first thirteen chapters of this book were 

^ written as letters to the Westminster Gazette. He 

db would probably not have republished them in their 

j" present form, as he intended to write a longer book 

-aU on his travels; but they are now printed with only 

the correction of a few evident slips. 

The two remaining chapters appeared in the New 

f^ Statesman, soon after the outbreak of war. 

Thanks are due to the Editors who have allowed 

the republication of the articles. 

E. M. 



Contents 



Note .... 
Rupert Brooke: by Henry James 

LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

I. Arrival 

II. New York . 

m. New York (continued) 

IV. Boston and Harvard 

V. Montreal and Ottawa 

VI. Quebec and the Saguenay . 

VII. Ontario 

VIII. Niagara Falls 

IX. To Winnipeg 

X. Outside 

XI. The Prairies 

XII. The Indians . 

XIII. The Rockies . 

XIV. Some Niggers 

An Unusual Young Man 



PAGE 
V 

ix 

3 

13 

25 

37 

49 

61 

75 

87 

99 

111 

123 

135 

147 

159 

173 



RUPERT BROOKE 

Nothing more generally or more recurrently solicits 
us, in the light of literature, I think, than the interest 
of our learning how the poet, the true poet, and 
above all the particular one with whom we may 
for the moment be concerned, has come into his 
estate, asserted and preserved his identity, worked 
out his question of sticking to that and to nothing 
else; and has so been able to reach us and touch 
us as a poet, in spite of the accidents and dangers 
that must have beset this course. The chances 
and changes, the personal history of any absolute 
genius, draw us to watch his adventure with curiosity 
and inquiry, lead us on to win more of his secret 
and borrow more of his experience (I mean, needless 
to say, when we are at all critically minded); but 
there is something in the clear safe arrival of the 
poetic nature, in a given case, at the point of its 
free and happy exercise, that provokes, if not the 
cold impulse to challenge or cross-question it, at 
least the need of understanding so far as possible 
how, in a world in which difficulty and disaster 
are frequent, the most wavering and flickering of 
all fine flames has escaped extinction. We go back, 
we help ourselves to hang about the attestation of 
the first spark of the flame, and like to indulge in 
a fond notation of such facts as that of the air in 



X LETTERS FEOM AMERICA 

which it was kindled and insisted on proceeding, 
or yet perhaps failed to proceed, to a larger com- 
bustion, and the draughts, blowing about the world, 
that were either, as may have happened, to quicken 
its native force or perhaps to extinguish it in a 
gust of undue violence. It is naturally when the 
poet has emerged unmistakably clear, or has at a 
happy moment of his story seemed likely to, that 
our attention and our suspense in the matter are 
most intimately engaged; and we are at any rate 
in general beset by the impression and haunted by 
the observed law, that the growth and the triumph 
of the faculty at its finest have been positively in 
proportion to certain rigours of circumstance. 

It is doubtless not indeed so much that this appear- 
ance has been inveterate as that the quality of 
genius in fact associated with it is apt to strike us 
as the clearest we know. We think of Dante in 
harassed exile, of Shakespeare under sordidly pro- 
fessional stress, of Milton in exasperated exposure 
and material darkness; we think of Burns and 
Chatterton, and Keats and Shelley and Coleridge, 
we think of Leopardi and Musset and Emily Bronte 
and Walt Whitman, as it is open to us surely to 
think even of Wordsworth, so harshly conditioned 
by his spareness and bareness and bleakness — all 
this in reference to the voices that have most proved 
their command of the ear of time, and with the 
various examples added of those claiming, or at 
best enjoying, but the slighter attention; and 
their office thus mainly affects us as that of showing 
in how jostled, how frequently arrested and all but 



RUPERT BROOKE xi 

defeated a hand, the torch could still be carried. 
It is not of course for the countrymen of Byron 
and of Tennyson and Swinburne, any more than 
for those of Victor Hugo, to say nothing of those 
of Edmond Rostand, to forget the occurrence on 
occasion of high instances in which the dangers all 
seemed denied and only favour and facility recorded; 
but it would take more of these than we can begin 
to set in a row to purge us of that prime determinant, 
after all, of our affection for the great poetic muse, 
the vision of the rarest sensibility and the largest 
generosity we know kept by her at their pitch, kept 
fighting for their life and insisting on their range 
of expression, amid doubts and derisions and buffets, 
even sometimes amid stones of stumbling quite 
self-invited, that might at any moment have made 
the loss of the precious clue really irremediable. 
Which moral, so pointed, accounts assuredly for 
half our interest in the poetic character — a sentiment 
more unlikely than not, I think, to survive a sus- 
tained succession of Victor Hugos and Rostands, 
or of Byrons, Tennysons and Swinburnes. We 
quite consciously miss in these bards, as we find 
ourselves rather wondering even at our failure to 
miss it in Shelley, that such " complications " as 
they may have had to reckon with were not in 
general of the cruelly troublous order, and that no 
stretch of the view either of our own "theory of 
art" or of our vivacity of passion as making trouble, 
contributes perceptibly the required savour of the 
pathetic. We cling, critically or at least experienti- 
ally speaking, to our superstition, if not absolutely 



xii LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

to our approved measure, of this grace and proof; 
and that truly, to cut my argument short, is what 
sets us straight down before a sudden case in which 
the old discrimination quite drops to the ground — 
in which we neither on the one hand miss anything 
that the general association could have given it, 
nor on the other recognise the pomp that attends 
the grand exceptions I have mentioned - 

Rupert Brooke, young, happy, radiant, extra- 
ordinarily endowed and irresistibly attaching, vir- 
tually met a soldier's death, met it in the stress of 
action and the all but immediate presence of the 
enemy; but he is before us as a new, a confounding 
and superseding example altogether, an unprece- 
dented image, formed to resist erosion by time or 
vulgarisation by reference, of quickened possibilities, 
finer ones than ever before, in the stuff poets may 
be noted as made of. With twenty reasons fixing 
the interest and the charm that will henceforth 
abide in his name and constitute, as we may say, 
his legend, he submits all helplessly to one in parti- 
cular which is, for appreciation, the least personal 
to him or inseparable from him, and he does this 
because, while he is still in the highest degree of 
the distinguished faculty and quality, we happen 
to feel him even more markedly and significantly 
"modern." This is why I speak of the mixture 
of his elements as new, feeling that it governs his 
example, put by it in a light which nothing else 
could have equally contributed — so that Byron for 
instance, who startled his contemporaries by taking 
for granted scarce one of the articles that forme • 



RUPERT BROOKE xiii 

their comfortable faith and by revelling in almost 
everything that made them idiots if he himself was 
to figure as a child of truth, looks to us, by any such 
measure, comparatively plated over with the im- 
penetrable rococo of his own day. I speak, I hasten 
to add, not of Byron's volume, his flood and his 
fortune, but of his really having quarrelled with the 
temper and the accent of his age still more where 
they might have helped him to expression than 
where he but flew in their face. He hugged his 
pomp, whereas our unspeakably fortunate young 
poet of to-day, linked like him also, for consecration 
of the final romance, with the isles of Greece, took 
for his own the whole of the poetic consciousness 
he was born to, and moved about in it as a stripped 
young swimmer might have kept splashing through 
blue water and coming up at any point that friend- 
liness and fancy, with every prejudice shed, might 
determine. Rupert expressed us all, at the highest 
tide of our actuality, and was the creature of a 
freedom restricted only by that condition of his 
blinding youth, which we accept on the whole with 
gratitude and relief — given that I qualify the con- 
dition as dazzling even to himself. How can it 
therefore not be interesting to see a little what the 
wondrous modern in him consisted of? 



What it first and foremost really comes to, I think, 
is the fact that at an hour when the civilised peoples 
are on exhibition, quite finally and sharply on show. 



xiv LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

to each other and to the world, as they absolutely 
never in all their long history have been before, 
the English tradition (both of amenity and of energy, 
I naturally mean), should have flowered at once into 
a specimen so beautifully producible. Thousands 
of other sentiments are of course all the while, in 
different connections, at hand for us; but it is of 
the exquisite civility, the social instincts of the race, 
'poetically expressed, that I speak; and it would 
be hard to overstate the felicity of his fellow-country- 
men's being able just now to say: "Yes, this, 
with the imperfection of so many of our arrange- 
ments, with the persistence of so many of our mis- 
takes, with the waste of so much of our effort and 
the weight of the many-coloured mantle of time 
that drags so redundantly about us, this natural 
accommodation of the English spirit, this frequent 
extraordinary beauty of the English aspect, this 
finest saturation of the English intelligence by its 
most immediate associations, tasting as they mainly 
do of the long past, this ideal image of English youth, 
in a word, at once radiant and reflective, are things 
that appeal to us as delightfully exhibitional beyond 
a doubt, yet as drawn, to the last fibre, from the 
very wealth of our own conscience and the very 
force of our own history. We haven't, for such 
an instance of our genius, to reach out to strange 
places or across other, and otherwise productive, 
tracts; the exemplary instance himself has well- 
nigh as a matter of course reached and revelled, 
for that is exactly our way in proportion as we feel 
ourselves clear. But the kind of experience so 



RUPERT BROOKE xv 

entailed, of contribution so gathered, is just what 
we wear easiest when we have been least stinted 
of it, and what our English use of makes perhaps 
our vividest reference to our thick-growing native 
determinants." 

Rupert Brooke, at any rate, the charmed com- 
mentator may well keep before him, simply did all 
the usual English things — under the happy provision 
of course that he found them in his way at their best; 
and it was exactly most delightful in him that no 
inordinate expenditure, no anxious extension of 
the common plan, as "liberally" applied all about 
him, had been incurred or contrived to predetermine 
his distinction. It is difficult to express on the 
contrary how peculiar a value attached to his having 
simply "come in" for the general luck awaiting 
any English youth who may not be markedly inapt 
for the traditional chances. He could in fact easily 
strike those who most appreciated him as giving 
such an account of the usual English things — to 
repeat the form of my allusion to them — as seemed 
to address you to them, in their very considerable 
number indeed, for any information about him that 
might matter, but which left you wholly to judge 
whether they seemed justified by their fruits. This 
manner about them, as one may call it in general, 
often contributes to your impression that they make 
for a certain strain of related modesty which may 
on occasion be one of their happiest effects; it at 
any rate, in days when my acquaintance with them 
was slighter, used to leave me gaping at the treasure 
of operation, the far recessional perspectives, it 



xvi LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

took for granted and any offered demonstration of 
the extent or the mysteries of which seemed unthink- 
able just in proportion as the human resultant 
testified in some one or other of his odd ways to their 
influence. He might not always be, at any rate on 
first acquaintance, a resultant explosively human, 
but there was in any case one reflection he could 
always cause you to make: "What a wondrous 
system it indeed must be which insists on flourishing 
to all appearance under such an absence of advertised 
or even of confessed relation to it as would do 
honour to a vacuum produced by an air-pump ! " 
The formulation, the approximate expression of 
what the system at large might or mightn't do for 
those in contact with it, became thus one's own 
fitful care, with one's attention for a considerable 
period doubtless dormant enough, but with the 
questions always liable to revive before the indivi- 
dual case. 

Rupert Brooke made them revive as soon as one 
began to know him, or in other words made one want 
to read back into him each of his promoting causes 
without exception, to trace to some source in the 
ambient air almost any one, at a venture, of his 
aspects; so precious a loose and careless bundle of 
happy references did that inveterate trick of giving 
the go-by to over-emphasis which he shared with 
his general kind fail to prevent your feeling sure of 
his having about him. I think the liveliest interest 
of these was that while not one of them was signally 
romantic, by the common measure of the great 
English amenity, they yet hung together, rein- 



RUPERT BROOKE xvii 

forcing and enhancing each other, in a way that 
seemed to join their hands for an incomparably 
educative or civiHsing process, the great mark of 
which was that it took some want of amenabiHty 
in particular subjects to betray anything Hke a gap. 
I do not mean of course to say that gaps, and occasion- 
ally of the most flagrant, were made so supremely 
diflficult of occurrence; but only that the effect, 
in the human resultants who kept these, and with 
the least effort, most in abeyance, was a thing one 
wouldn't have had different by a single shade. I 
am not sure that such a case of the recognisable 
was the better established by the fact of Rupert's 
being one of the three sons of a house-master at 
Rugby, where he was born in 1887 and where he 
lost his father in 1910, the elder of his brothers 
having then already died and the younger being 
destined to fall in battle at the allied Front, shortly 
after he himself had succumbed; but the circum- 
stance I speak of gives a peculiar and an especially 
welcome consecration to that perceptible play in 
him of the inbred "public school" character the 
bloom of which his short life had too little time to 
remove and which one wouldn't for the world not 
have been disposed to note, with everything else, 
in the beautiful complexity of his attributes. The 
fact was that if one liked him — and I may as well 
say at once that few young men, in our time, can 
have gone through life under a greater burden, 
more easily carried and kept in its place, of being 
liked — one liked absolutely everything about him, 
without the smallest exception; so that he appeared 



xviii LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

to convert before one's eyes all that happened to 
him, or that had or that ever might, not only to his 
advantage as a source of life and experience, but to 
the enjoyment on its own side of a sort of illustrational 
virtue or glory. This appearance of universal 
assimilation — often indeed by incalculable ironic 
reactions which were of the very essence of the restless 
young intelligence rejoicing in its gaiety — made 
each part of his rich consciousness, so rapidly ac- 
quired, cling, as it were, to the company of all the 
other parts, so as at once neither to miss any touch 
of the luck (one keeps coming back to that), incurred 
by them, or to let them suffer any want of its own 
lightness. It was as right, through the spell he 
cast altogether, that he should have come into the 
world and have passed his boyhood in that Rugby 
home, as that he should have been able later on to 
wander as irrepressibly as the spirit moved him, 
or as that he should have found himself fitting as 
intimately as he was very soon to do into any number 
of the incalculabilities, the intellectual at least, of 
the poetic temperament. He had them all, he gave 
himself in his short career up to them all — and I 
confess that, partly for reasons to be further devel- 
oped, I am unable even to guess what they might 
eventually have made of him; which is of course 
what brings us round again to that view of him as 
the young poet with absolutely nothing but his 
generic spontaneity to trouble about, the young 
poet profiting for happiness by a general condition 
unprecedented for young poets, that I began by 
indulging in. 



RUPERT BROOKE xix 

He went from Rugby to Cambridge, where, after 
a while, he carried off a Fellowship at King's, and 
where, during a short visit there in "May week," 
or otherwise early in June 1909, I first, and as I was 
to find, very unforgettingly, met him. He reappears 
to me as with his felicities all most promptly divinable, 
in that splendid setting of the river at the "backs"; 
as to which indeed I remember vaguely wondering 
what it was left to such a place to do with the added, 
the verily wasted, grace of such a person, or how 
even such a person could hold his own, as who should 
say, at such a pitch of simple scenic perfection. 
Any difficulty dropped, however, to the reconciling 
vision; for that the young man was publicly and 
responsibly a poet seemed the fact a little over- 
officiously involved — to the promotion of a certain 
surprise (on one's own part) at his having to "be" 
anything. It was to come over me still more after- 
wards that nothing of that or of any other sort need 
really have rested on him with a weight of obligation, 
and in fact I cannot but think that life might have 
been seen and felt to suggest to him, in an exposed 
unanimous conspiracy, that his status should be 
left to the general sense of others, ever so many 
others, who would sufficiently take care of it, and 
that such a fine rare case was accordingly as arguable 
as it possibly could be — with the pure, undischarged 
poetry of him and the latent presumption of his 
dying for his country the only things to gainsay it. 
The question was to a certain extent crude, "Why 
need he be a poet, why need he so specialise.?" 
but if this was so it was only, it was already, symp- 



XX LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

tomatic of the interesting final truth that he was 
to testify to his function in the unparalleled way. 
He was going to have the life (the unanimous con- 
spiracy so far achieved that), was going to have it 
under no more formal guarantee than that of his 
appetite and genius for it; and this was to help us 
all to the complete appreciation of him. No single 
scrap of the English fortune at its easiest and truest 
— which means of course with every vulgarity dropped 
out — but was to brush him as by the readiest in- 
stinctive wing, never over-straining a point or achiev- 
ing a miracle to do so; only trusting his exquisite 
imagination and temper to respond to the succession 
of his opportunities. It is in the light of what this 
succession could in the most natural and most familiar 
way in the world amount to for him that we find 
this idea of a beautiful crowning modernness above 
all to meet his case. The promptitude, the per- 
ception, the understanding, the quality of humour 
and sociability, the happy lapses in the logic of 
inward reactions (save for their all infallibly being 
poetic), of which he availed himself consented to be 
as illustrational as any fondest friend could wish, 
whether the subject of the exhibition was aware of 
the degree or not, and made his vivacity of vision, 
his exercise of fancy and irony, of observation at 
its freest, inevitable — while at the same time setting 
in motion no machinery of experience in which his 
curiosity, or in other words, the quickness of his 
familiarity, didn't move faster than anything else. 



RUPERT BROOKE xxi 

II 

I owe to his intimate and devoted friend Mr Edward 
Marsh the communication of many of his letters, 
these ah'eady gathered into an admirable brief 
memoir which is yet to appear and which will give 
ample help in the illustrative way to the pages to 
which the present remarks form a preface, and which 
are collected from the columns of the London evening 
journal in which they originally saw the light. The 
"literary baggage" of his short course consists thus 
of his two slender volumes of verse and of these two 
scarcely stouter sheafs of correspondence^ — though 
I should add that the hitherto unpublished letters 
enjoy the advantage of a commemorative and 
interpretative commentary, at the Editor's hands, 
which will have rendered the highest service to each 
matter. That even these four scant volumes tell 
the whole story, or fix the whole image, of the fine 
young spirit they are concerned with we certainly 
hold back from allowing; his case being in an ex- 
traordinary degree that of a creature on whom the 
gods had smiled their brightest and half of whose 
manifestation therefore was by the simple act of 
presence and of direct communication. He did 
in fact specialise, to repeat my term; only since, 
as one reads him, whether in verse or in prose, that 
distinguished readability seems all the specialisation 
one need invoke, so when the question was of the 
gift that made of his face to face address a circum- 
stance so complete in itself as apparently to cover all 
the ground, leaving no margin either, an activity 

1 There remain also to be published a] book on John Webster and a 
prose play in one act. — ^E. M. 



xxii LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

to the last degree justified appeared the only name 
for one's impression. The moral of all which is 
doubtless that these brief, if at the same time very 
numerous, moments of his quick career formed 
altogether as happy a time, in as happy a place, to 
be born to as the student of the human drama has 
ever caught sight of — granting always, that is, that 
some actor of the scene has been thoroughly up to 
his part. Such was the sort of recognition, assuredly, 
under which Rupert played his — that of his lending 
himself to every current and contact, the "newer," 
the later fruit of time, the better; only this not 
because any particular one was an agitating re- 
velation, but because with due sensibility, with a 
restless inward ferment, at the centre of them all, 
what could he possibly so much feel like as the heir 
of all the ages? I remember his originally giving 
me, though with no shade of imputable intention, 
the sense of his just being that, with the highest 
amiability — the note in him that, as I have hinted, 
one kept coming back to; so that during a long wait 
for another glimpse of him I thought of the prac- 
tice and function so displayed as wholly engaging, 
took for granted his keeping them up with equal 
facility and pleasure. Nothing could have been more 
delightful accordingly, later on, in renewal of the 
personal acquaintance than to gather that this was 
exactly what had been taking place, and with an 
inveteracy as to which his letters are a full docu- 
mentation. Whatever his own terms for the process 
might be had he been brought to book, and though 
the variety of his terms for anything and everything 



RUPERT BROOKE xxiii 

was the very play, and even the measure, of his 
talent, the most charmed and conclusive description 
of him was that no young man had ever so naturally 
taken on under the pressure of life the poetic nature, 
and shaken it so free of every encumbrance by simply 
wearing it as he wore his complexion or his outline. 

That, then, was the way the imagination followed 
him with its luxury of confidence: he was doing 
everything that could be done in the time (since 
this was the modernest note), but performing each 
and every finest shade of these blest acts with a 
poetic punctuality that was only matched by a 
corresponding social sincerity. I recall perfectly 
my being sure of it all the while, even if with little 
current confirmation beyond that supplied by his 
first volume of verse; and the effect of the whole 
record is now to show that such a conclusion was 
quite extravagantly right. He was constantly doing 
all the things, and this with a reckless freedom, as 
it might be called, that really dissociated the respon- 
sibility of the precious character from anything like 
conscious domestic coddlement to a point at which 
no troubled young singer, none, that is, equally 
troubled, had perhaps ever felt he could afford to 
dissociate it. Rupert's resources for affording, in 
the whole connection, were his humour, his irony, 
his need, under every quiver of inspiration, toward 
whatever end, to be amused and amusing, and to 
find above all that this could never so much occur 
as by the application of his talent, of which he was 
perfectly conscious, to his own case. He carried 
his case with him, for purposes of derision as much 



xxiv LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

as for any others, wherever he went, and how he 
went everywhere, thus blissfully burdened, is what 
meets us at every turn on his printed page. My 
only doubt about him springs in fact from the 
question of whether he knew that the earthly felicity 
enjoyed by him, his possession of the exquisite 
temperament linked so easily to the irrepressible 
experience, was a thing to make of the young Briton 
of the then hour so nearly the spoiled child of history 
that one wanted something in the way of an extra 
guarantee to feel soundly sure of him. I come back 
once more to his having apparently never dreamt 
of any stretch of the point of liberal allowance, of 
so-called adventure, on behalf of "development," 
never dreamt of any stretch but that of the imagin- 
ation itself indeed — quite a different matter and even 
if it too were at moments to recoil; it was so true 
that the general measure of his world as to what it 
might be prompt and pleasant and in the day's 
work or the day's play to "go in for" was exactly 
the range that tinged all his education as liberal, the 
education the free design of which he had left so 
short a way behind him when he died. 

Just there was the luck attendant of the coincidence 
of his course with the moment at which the pro- 
ceeding hither and yon to the tune of almost any 
"happy thought," and in the interest of almost 
any branch of culture or invocation of response that 
might be more easily improvised than not, could 
positively strike the observer as excessive, as in 
fact absurd, for the formation of taste or the enrich- 
ment of genius, unless the principle of these values 



RUPERT BROOKE xxv 

had in a particular connection been subjected in 
advance to some challenge or some test. Why 
should it take such a flood of suggestion, such a 
luxury of acquaintance and contact, only to make 
superficial specimens? Why shouldn't the art of 
living inward a little more, and thereby of digging 
a little deeper or pressing a little further, rather 
modestly replace the enviable, always the enviable, 
young Briton's enormous range of alternatives in 
the way of question-begging movement, the way 
of vision and of non-vision, the enormous habit 
of holidays? If one could have made out once for 
all that holidays were proportionately and infallibly 
inspiring one would have ceased thoughtfully to 
worry; but the question was as it stood an old 
story, even though it might freshly radiate, on 
occasion, under the recognition that the seed- 
smothered patch of soil flowered, when it did flower, 
with a fragrance all its own. This concomitant, 
however, always dangled, that if it were put to us, 
"Do you really mean you would rather they should 
not perpetually have been again for a look-in at 
Berlin, or an awfully good time at Munich, or a 
rush round Sicily, or a dash through the States to 
Japan, with whatever like rattling renewals?" 
you would after all shrink from the responsibility 
of such a restriction before being clear as to what 
you would suggest in its place. Rupert went on 
reading-parties from King's to Lulworth for instance, 
which the association of the two places, the two 
so extraordinarily finished scenes, causes to figure 
as a sort of preliminary flourish; and everything 



xxvi LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

that came his way after that affects me as the blest 
indulgence in flourish upon flourish. This was not 
in the least the air, or the desire, or the pretension 
of it, but the unfailing felicity just kept catching 
him up, just left him never wanting nor waiting 
for some pretext to roam, or indeed only the more 
responsively to stay, doing either, whichever it might 
be, as a form of highly intellectualised "fun." He 
didn't overflow with shillings, yet so far as roving 
was concerned the practice was always easy, and 
perhaps the adorably whimsical lyric, contained 
in his second volume of verse, on the pull of Grant- 
chester at his heartstrings, as the old vicarage of that 
sweet adjunct to Cambridge could present itself to 
him in a Berlin cafe, may best exempUfy the sort of 
thing that was represented, in one way and another, 
by his taking his most ultimately English ease. 

Whatever Berlin or Munich, to speak of them only, 
could do or fail to do for him, how can one not rejoice 
without reserve in the way he felt what he did feel 
as poetic reaction of the liveHest and finest, with 
the added interest of its often turning at one and the 
same time to the fullest sincerity and to a perversity 
of the most "evolved".^ — since I can not dispense 
with that sign of truth. Never was a young singer 
either less obviously sentimental or less addicted 
to the mere twang of the guitar; at the same time 
that it was always his personal experience or his 
curious, his not a little defiantly excogitated, inner 
vision that he sought to catch; some of the odd 
fashion of his play with which latter seems on 
occasion to preponderate over the truly pleasing 



RUPERT BROOKE xxvii 

poet's appeal to beauty or cultivated habit of grace. 
Odd enough, no doubt, that Rupert should appear 
to have had well-nigh in horror the cultivation of 
grace for its own sake, as we say, and yet should 
really not have disfigured his poetic countenance 
by a single touch quotable as showing this. The 
medal of the mere pleasant had always a reverse 
for him, and it was generally in that substitute he 
was most interested. We catch in him reaction 
upon reaction, the succession of these conducing to 
his entirely unashamed poetic complexity, and of 
course one observation always to be made about 
him, one reminder always to be gratefully welcomed, 
is that we are dealing after all with one of the 
youngest quantities of art and character taken 
together that ever arrived at an irresistible appeal. 
His irony, his liberty, his pleasantry, his paradox, 
and what I have called his perversity, are all nothing 
if not young; and I may as well say at once for him 
that I find in the imagination of their turning in 
time, dreadful time, to something more balanced 
and harmonised, a difficulty insuperable. The self- 
consciousness, the poetic, of his so free figuration 
(in verse, only in verse, oddly enough) of the un- 
pleasant to behold, to touch, or even to smell, was 
certainly, I think, nothing if not "self-conscious," 
but there were so many things in his consciousness, 
which was never in the least unpeopled, that it would 
have been a rare chance had his projection of the 
self that we are so apt to make an object of invidious 
allusion stayed out. What it all really most comes 
to, you feel again, is that none of his impulses pros- 



xxviii LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

pered in solitude, or, for that matter, were so much as 
permitted to mumble their least scrap there; he was 
predestined and condemned to sociability, which 
no league of neglect could have deprived him of 
even had it speculatively tried: whereby what was 
it but his own image that he most saw reflected in 
other faces? It would still have been there, it 
couldn't possibly have succeeded in not being, even 
had he closed his eyes to it with elaborate tightness. 
The only neglect must have been on his own side, 
where indeed it did take form in that of as signal 
an opportunity to become "spoiled," probably, 
as ever fell in a brilliant young man's way: so that 
to help out my comprehension of the unsightly and 
unsavoury, sufficiently wondered at, with which his 
muse repeatedly embraced the occasion to associ- 
ate herself, I take the thing for a declaration of 
the idea that he might himself prevent the spoiling 
so far as possible. He could in fact prevent nothing, 
the wave of his fortune and his favour continuing 
so to carry him; which is doubtless one of the 
reasons why, through our general sense that nothing 
could possibly not be of the last degree of rightness 
in him, what would have been wrong in others, 
literally in any creature but him, like for example 
"A Channel Passage" of his first volume, simply 
puts on, while this particular muse stands anxiously 
by, a kind of dignity of experiment quite consistent 
with our congratulating her, at the same time, as 
soon as it is over. What was "A Channel Passage" 
thus but a flourish marked with the sign of all his 
flourishes, that of being a success and having fruition ? 



RUPERT BROOKE xxix 

Though it performed the extraordinary feat of 
directing the contents of the poet's stomach straight 
at the object of his displeasure, we feel that, by 
some excellent grace, the object is not at all reached 
— too many things, and most of all, too innocently 
enormous a cynicism, standing in the way and them- 
selves receiving the tribute; having in a word, 
impatient young cynicism as they are, that experience 
as well as various things. 



Ill 



No detail of Mr Marsh's admirable memoir may 
I allow myself to anticipate. I can only announce 
it as a picture, with all the elements in iridescent 
fusion, of the felicity that fairly dogged Rupert's 
steps, as we may say, and that never allowed him 
to fall below its measure. We shall read into it 
even more relations than nominally appear, and 
every one of them again a flourish, every one of them 
a connection with his time, a "sampling" of it at its 
most multitudinous and most characteristic; every 
one of them too a record of the state of some other 
charmed, not less than charming party — even when 
the letter-writer's expression of the interest, the 
amusement, the play of fancy, of taste, of whatever 
sort of appreciation or reaction for his own spirit, 
is the ostensible note. This is what I mean in 
especial by the constancy with which, and the cost 
at which, perhaps not less, for others, the poetic 
sensibility was maintained and guaranteed. It was 



XXX LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

as genuine as if he had been a bard perched on an 
eminence with a harp, and yet it was arranged 
for, as we may say, by the close consensus of those 
who had absolutely to know their relation with him 
but as a delight and who wanted therefore to keep 
him, to the last point, true to himself. His complete 
curiosity and sociability might have made him, on 
these lines, factitious, if it had not happened that 
the people he so variously knew and the contacts 
he enjoyed were just of the kind to promote most 
his facility and vivacity and intelligence of life. 
They were all young together, allowing for three 
or four notable, by which I mean far from the least 
responsive, exceptions; they were all fresh and free 
and acute and aware and in "the world," when not 
out of it; all together at the high speculative, the 
high talkative pitch of the initiational stage of these 
latest years, the informed and animated, the so 
consciously non-benighted, geniality of which was 
to make him the clearest and most projected poetic 
case, with the question of difficulty and doubt and 
frustration most solved, the question of the immediate 
and its implications most in order for him, that it 
was possible to conceive. He had found at once 
to his purpose a wondrous enough old England, an 
England breaking out into numberless assertions 
of a new awareness, into liberties of high and clean, 
even when most sceptical and discursive, young 
intercourse; a carnival of half anxious and half 
elated criticism, all framed and backgrounded in 
still richer accumulations, both moral and material, 
or, as who should say, pictorial, of the matter of 



RUPERT BROOKE xxxi 

course and the taken for granted. Nothing could 
have been in greater contrast, one cannot too much 
insist, to the situation of the traditional lonely 
lyrist who yearns for connections and relations yet 
to be made and whose difficulty, lyrical, emotional, 
personal, social or intellectual, has thereby so little 
in common with any embarrassment of choice. 
The author of the pages before us was perhaps the 
young lyrist, in all the annals of verse, who, having 
the largest luxury of choice, yet remained least 
"demorahsed" by it — how little demoralised he 
was to round off his short history by showing. 

It was into these conditions, thickening and 
thickening, in their comparative serenity, up to 
the eleventh hour, that the War came smashing 
down; but of the basis, the great garden ground, 
all green and russet and silver, all a tissue of dis- 
tinguished and yet so easy occasions, so improvised 
extensions, which they had already placed at his 
service and that of his extraordinarily amiable and 
constantly enlarged "set" for the exercise of their 
dealing with the rest of the happy earth in punctuat- 
ing interludes, it is the office of our few but precious 
documents to enable us to judge. The interlude 
that here concerns us most is that of the year spent 
in his journey round a considerable part of the 
world in 1913-14, testifying with a charm that 
increases as he goes to that quest of unprejudiced 
culture, the true poetic, the vision of the life of 
man, which was to prove the liveliest of his impulses. 
It was not indeed under the flag of that research that 
he offered himself for the Army almost immediately 



xxxii LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

after his return to England — and even if when a 
young man was so essentially a poet we need see no 
act in him as a prosaic alternative. The misfortune 
of this set of letters from New York and Boston, 
from Canada and Samoa, addressed, for the most 
part, to a friendly London evening journal is, alas, 
in the fact that they are of so moderate a quantity; 
for we make him out as steadily more vivid and de- 
lightful while his opportunity grows. He is touch- 
ing at first, inevitably quite juvenile, in the measure 
of his good faith; we feel him not a little lost and 
lonely and stranded in the New York pandemonium 
— obliged to throw himself upon sky-scrapers and 
the overspread blackness pricked out in a flickering 
fury of imaged advertisement for want of some more 
interesting view of character and manners. We 
long to take him by the hand and show him finer 
lights — eyes of but meaner range, after all, being 
adequate to the gape at the vertical business blocks 
and the lurid sky-clamour for more dollars. We 
feel in a manner his sensibility wasted and would 
fain turn it on to the capture of deeper meanings. 
But we must leave him to himself and to youth's 
facility of wonder; he is amused, beguiled, struck 
on the whole with as many differences as we could 
expect, and sufficiently reminded, no doubt, of the 
number of words he is restricted to. It is moreover 
his sign, as it is that of the poetic turn of mind in 
general that we seem to catch him alike in antici- 
pations or divinations, and in lapses and freshnesses, 
of experience that surprise us. He makes various 
reflections, some of them all perceptive and ingenious 



RUPERT BROOKE xxxiii 

— as about the faces, the men's in particular, seen 
in the streets, the public conveyances and elsewhere; 
though falling a little short, in his friendly wondering 
way, of that bewildered apprehension of monotony 
of type, of modelling lost in the desert, which we 
might have expected of him, and of the question 
above all of what is destined to become of that 
more and more vanishing quantity the American 
nose other than Judaic. 

What we note in particular is that he likes, to 
all appearance, many more things than he doesn't, 
and how superlatively he is struck with the promp- 
titude and wholeness of the American welcome and 
of all its friendly service. What it is but too easy, 
with the pleasure of having known him, to read 
into all this is the operat on of his own irresistible 
quality, and of the state of felicity he clearly created 
just by appearing as a party to the social relation. 
He moves and circulates to our vision as so naturally, 
so beautifully undesigning a weaver of that spell, 
that we feel comparatively little of Ihe story told 
even by his diverted report of it; so much fuller 
a report would surely proceed, could we appeal to 
their memory, their sense of poetry, from those 
into whose ken he floated. It is impossible not to 
figure him, to the last felicity, as he comes and goes, 
presenting himself always with a singular effect 
both of suddenness and of the readiest rightness; 
we should always have liked to be there, wherever 
it was, for the justification of our own fond confidence 
and the pleasure of seeing it unfailingly spread and 
spread. The ironies and paradoxes of his verse, 



xxxiv LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

in all this record, fall away from him; he takes to 
direct observation and accepts with perfect good- 
humour any hazards of contact, some of the shocks 
of encounter proving more muffled for him than 
might, as I say, have been feared — witness the 
American Jew with whom he appears to have spent 
some hours in Canada; and of course the "word" 
of the whole thing is that he simply reaped at every 
turn the harmonising benefit that his presence 
conferred. This it is in especial that makes us 
regret so much the scanting, as we feel it, of his 
story; it deprives us in just that proportion of 
certain of the notes of his appearance and his 
"success." There was the poetic fact involved — • 
that, being so gratefully apprehended everywhere, 
his own response was^ inevitably prescribed and 
pitched as the perfect friendly and genial and liberal 
thing. Moreover/ the value of his having so let 
himself loose in the immensity tells more at each 
step in favour of his style; the pages from Canada, 
where as an impressionist, he increasingly finds his 
feet, and even finds to the same increase a certain 
comfort of association, are better than those from 
the States, while those from the Pacific Islands 
rapidly brighten and enlarge their inspiration. This 
part of his adventure was clearly the great success 
and fell in with his fancy, amusing and quickening 
and rewarding him, more than anything in the whole 
revelation. He lightly performs the miracle, to 
my own sense, which R. L. Stevenson, which even 
Pierre Loti, taking however long a rope, had not 
performed; he charmingly conjures away — though 



RUPERT BROOKE xxxv 

in this prose more than in the verse of his second 
volume — the marked tendency of the whole exquisite 
region to insist on the secret of its charm, when 
incorrigibly moved to do so, only at the expense of 
its falling a little flat, or turning a little stale, on 
our hands. I have for myself at least marked the 
tendency, and somehow felt it point a graceless 
moral, the moral that as there are certain faces too 
well produced by nature to be producible again 
by the painter, the portraitist, so there are certain 
combinations of earthly ease, of the natural and 
social art of giving pleasure, which fail of character, 
or accent, even of the power to interest, under the 
strain of transposition or of emphasis. Rupert, 
with an instinct of his own, transposes and insists 
only in the right degree; or what it doubtless comes 
to is that we simply see him arrested by so vivid 
a picture of the youth of the world at its blandest 
as to make all his culture seem a waste and all 
his questions a vanity. That is apparently the 
very effect of the Pacific life as those who dip into 
it seek, or feel that they are expected to seek, to 
report it; but it reports itself somehow through these 
pages, smilingly cools itself off in them, with the 
lightest play of the fan ever placed at its service. 
Never, clearly, had he been on such good terms 
with the hour, never found the life of the senses 
so anticipate the life of the imagination, or the life 
of the imagination so content itself with the life of 
the senses; it is all an abundance of amphibious 
felicity — he was as incessant and insatiable a swimmer 
as if he had been a triton framed for a decoration; 



xxxvi LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

and one half makes out that some low-lurking instinct, 
some vague foreboding of what awaited him, on 
his own side the globe, in the air of so-called civilisa- 
tion, prompted him to drain to the last drop the 
whole perfect negation of the acrid. He might have 
been waiting for the tide of the insipid to begin to 
flow again, as it seems ever doomed to do when the 
acrid, the saving acrid, has already ebbed; at any 
rate his holiday had by the end of the springtime 
of 1914 done for him all it could, without a grain of 
waste — his assimilations being neither loose nor 
literal, and he came back to England as promis- 
cuously qualified, as variously quickened, as his 
best friends could wish for fine production and fine 
illustration in some order still awaiting sharp 
definition. Never certainly had the free poetic 
sense in him more rejoiced in an incorruptible 
sincerity. 



IV 



He was caught up of course after the shortest 
interval by the strong rush of that general inspiration 
in which at first all differences, all individual relations 
to the world he lived in, seemed almost ruefully 
or bewilderedly to lose themselves. The pressing 
thing was of a sudden that youth was youth and 
genius community and sympathy. He plunged 
into that full measure of these things which simply 
made and spread itself as it gathered them in, made 
itself of responses and faiths and understandings 



RUPERT BROOKE xxxvii 

that were all the while in themselves acts of curiosity, 
romantic and poetic throbs and wonderments, with 
reality, as it seemed to call itself, breaking in after 
a fashion that left the whole past pale, and that 
yet could flush at every turn with meanings and 
visions borrowing their expression from whatever 
had, among those squandered preliminaries, those 
too merely sportive intellectual and critical values, 
happened to make most for the higher truth. Of 
the successions of his matter of history at this time 
Mr Marsh's memoir is the infinitely touching record 
— touching after the fact, but to the accompaniment 
even at the time of certain now almost ineffable 
reflections; this especially, I mean, if one happened 
to be then not wholly without familiar vision of 
him. What could strike one more, for the immense 
occasion, than the measure that might be involved 
in it of desolating and heart-breaking waste, waste of 
quality, waste for that matter of quantity, waste 
of all the rich redundancies, all the light and all 
the golden store, which up to then had formed the 
very price and grace of life? Yet out of the depths 
themselves of this question rose the other, the 
tormenting, the sickening and at the same time the 
strangely sustaining, of why, since the offering 
couldn't at best be anything but great, it wouldn't 
be great just in proportion to its purity, or in other 
words its wholeness, everything in it that could 
make it most radiant and restless. Exquisite at 
such times the hushed watch of the mere hovering 
spectator unrelieved by any action of his own to 



xxxvili LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

take, which consists at once of so much wonder for 
why the finest of the fine should, to the sacrifice 
of the faculty we most know them by, have to 
become mere morsels in the huge promiscuity, 
and of the thrill of seeing that they add more than 
ever to our knowledge and our passion, which 
somehow thus becomes at the same time an un- 
fathomable abyss. 

Rupert, who had joined the Naval Brigade, took 
part in the rather distractedly improvised — as it 
at least at the moment appeared — movement for 
the relief of the doomed Antwerp, but was, later 
on, after the return of the force so engaged, for a 
few days in London, whither he had come up from 
camp in Dorsetshire, briefly invalided; thanks to 
which accident I had on a couple of occasions my 
last sight of him. It was all auspiciously, well- 
nigh extravagantly, congruous; nothing certainly 
could have been called more modern than all the 
elements and suggestions of his situation for the 
hour, the very spot in London that could best serve 
as a centre for vibrations the keenest and most 
various; a challenge to the appreciation of life, 
to that of the whole range of the possible English 
future, at its most uplifting. He had not yet so 
much struck me as an admirable nature en dis- 
ponibilitS and such as any cause, however high, 
might swallow up with a sense of being the sounder 
and sweeter for. More definitely perhaps the young 
poet, with all the wind alive in his sails, was as 
evident there in the guise of the young soldier and 



RUPERT BROOKE xxxix 

the thrice welcome young friend, who ;yet, I all 
recognisably remember, insisted on himself as little 
as ever in either character, and seemed even more 
disposed than usual not to let his intelligibility 
interfere with his modesty. He promptly recovered 
and returned to camp, whence it was testified that 
his specific practical aptitude, under the lively call, 
left nothing to be desired— a fact that expressed 
again, to the perception of his circle, with what 
truth the spring of inspiration worked in him, in 
the sense, I mean, that his imagination itself 
shouldered and made light of the material load. 
It had not yet, at the same time, been more associ- 
atedly active in a finer sense; my own next appre- 
hension of it at least was in reading the ^\e admir- 
able sonnets that had been published in "New 
Numbers" after the departure of his contingent 
for the campaign at the Dardanelles. To read these 
in the light of one's personal knowledge of him was 
to draw from them, inevitably, a meaning still 
deeper seated than their noble beauty, an authority, 
of the purest, attended with which his name in- 
scribes itself in its own character on the great English 
scroll. The impression, the admiration, the anxiety 
settled immediately — to my own sense at least — 
as upon something that would but too sharply feed 
them, falling in as it did with that whole particularly 
animated vision of him of which I have spoken. 
He had never seemed more animated with our 
newest and leafst deluded, least conventionalised 
life and perception and sensibility, and that formula 



xl LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

of his so distinctively fortunate, his overflowing 
share in our most developed social heritage which 
had already glimmered, began with this occasion 
to hang about him as one of the aspects, really a 
shining one, of his fate. 

I So I remember irrepressibly thinking and feeling, 
unspeakably apprehending, in a word; and so the 
whole exquisite exhalation of his own consciousness 
in the splendid sonnets, attach whatever essentially 
or exclusively poetic value to it we might, baffled 
or defied us as with a sort of supreme rightness. 
Everything about him of keenest and brightest 
(yes, absolutely of brightest) suggestion made so 
for his having been charged with every privilege, 
every humour, of our merciless actuality, our fatal 
excess of opportunity, that what indeed could the 
full assurance of this be but that, finding in him 
the most charming object in its course, the great 
tide was to lift him and sweep him away ? Questions 
and reflections after the fact perhaps, yet haunting 
for the time and during the short interval that was 
still to elapse — when, with the sudden news that he 
had met his doom, an irrepressible "of course, of 
course!" contributed its note well-nigh of support. 
It was as if the peculiar richness of his youth had 
itself marked its limit, so that what his own spirit 
was inevitably to feel about his "chance" — in- 
evitably because both the high pitch of the romantic 
and the ironic and the opposed abyss of the real 
came together in it — required, in the wondrous 
way, the consecration of the event. The event came 



RUPERT BROOKE xli 

indeed not in the manner prefigured by him in the 
repeatedly perfect line, that of the received death- 
stroke, the fall in action, discounted as such; which 
might have seemed very much because even the 
harsh logic and pressure of history were tender of 
him at the last and declined to go through more 
than the form of their function, discharging it with 
the least violence and surrounding it as with a 
legendary light. He was taken ill, as an effect of 
blood-poisoning, on his way from Alexandria to 
GaUipoli, and, getting ominously and rapidly worse, 
was removed from his transport to a French hospital 
ship, where, irreproachably cared for, he died in 
a few hours and without coming to consciousness. 
I deny myself any further anticipation of the story 
to which further noble associations attach, and 
the merest outline of which indeed tells it and rounds 
it off absolutely as the right harmony would have 
it. It is perhaps even a touch beyond any dreamt- 
of harmony that, under omission of no martial 
honour, he was to be carried by comrades and de- 
voted waiting sharers, whose evidence survives 
them, to the steep summit of a Greek island of 
infinite grace and there placed in such earth and 
amid such beauty of light and shade and embracing 
prospect as that the fondest reading of his young 
lifetime could have suggested nothing better. It 
struck us at home, I mean, as symbolising with the 
last refinement his whole instinct of selection and 
response, his relation to the overcharged appeal 
of his scene and hour. How could he have shown 



xlii LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

more the young English poetic possibility and 
faculty in which we were to seek the freshest re- 
flection of the intelligence and the soul of the new 
generation? The generosity, I may fairly say the 
joy, of his contribution to the general perfect way 
makes a monument of his high rest there at the 
heart of all that was once noblest in history. 

HENRY JAMES 



I 

ARRIVAL 



ARRIVAL 

However sedulously he may have avoided a 
preparatory reading of those 'impressions' 
of America which our hurried and observant 
Great continually record for the instruction 
of both nations, the pilgrim who is crossing 
the Atlantic for the first time cannot approach 
Sandy Hook Bar with so completely blank a 
mind as he would wish. So, at least, I found. 
It is not so much that the recent American 
invasion of London music-halls has bitten 
into one's brain a very definite taste of a 
jerking, vital, bizarre 'rag-time' civilisation. 
But the various and vivid comments of 
friends to whom the news of a traveller's 
departure is broken excite and predispose 
the imagination. That so many people who 
had been there should have such different 
and decided opinions about it! It must be 
at least remarkable. I felt the thrill of an 
explorer before I started. ''A country with- 
out conversation," said a philosopher. ''The 

3 



4 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

big land has a big heart," wrote a kindly 
scholar; and, by the same post, from another 
critic, "that land of crushing hospitality!" 
'*It's Hell, but it's fine," an artist told me. 
"El Cuspidorado," remarked an Oxford man, 
brilliantly. But one wiser than all the rest 
wrote: "Think gently of the Americans. 
They are so very young; and so very anxious 
to appear grown-up; and so very lovable." 
This was more generous than the unvarying 
comment of ordinary Enghsh friends when 
they heard of my purpose, ''My God!" 
And it was more precise than those nineteen 
several Americans, to each of whom I said, 
"I am going to visit America," and each of 
whom replied, after long reflection, "Wal! 
it's a great country !" 

Travelling by the ordinary routes, you meet 
the American people a week before you meet 
America. And my excitement to discover 
what, precisely, this nation was at, was in- 
flamed rather than damped by the attitude 
of a charming American youth who crossed 
by the same boat. That simpUcity that is 
not far down in any American was very 
beautifully on the dehghtful surface with him. 
The second day out he sidled shyly up to me. 
"Of what nationality are you?" he asked. 



ARRIVAL 5 

His face showed bewilderment when he heard. 
"I thought all Englishmen had moustaches," 
he said. I told him of the infinite variety, 
within the homogeneity, of our race. He did 
not listen, but settled down near me with the 
eager kindliness of a child. ''You know," 
he said, ''you'll never understand America. 
No, Sir. No Englishman can understand 
America. I've been in London. In your 
Houses of Parliament there is one door for 
peers to go in at, and one for ordinary people. 
Did I laugh some when I saw that.^ You 
bet your life, America's not like that. In 
America one man's just as good as another. 
You'll never understand America." I was 
all humility. His theme and his friendliness 
fired him. He rose with a splendour which, 
I had to confess to myself, England could 
never have given to him. "Would you hke 
to hear me re-cite to you the Declaration of 
Independence?" he asked. And he did. 

So it was with a fairly blank mind, and yet 
a hope of understanding, or at least of seeing, 
something very remarkably fresh, that I woke 
to hear we were in harbour, and tumbled out 
on deck at six of a fine summer morning to 
view a new world. New York Harbour is 
loveliest at night perhaps. On the Staten 



6 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

Island ferry-boat you slip out from the dark- 
ness right under the immense sky-scrapers. 
As they recede they form into a mass together, 
heaping up one behind another, fire-lined and 
majestic, sentinel over the black, gold-streaked 
waters. Their cliff-like boldness is the greater, 
because to either side sweep in the East River 
and the Hudson River, leaving this piled 
promontory between. To the right hangs 
the great stretch of the Brooklyn Suspension 
Bridge, its slight curve very purely outlined 
with light; over it luminous trams, like 
shuttles of fire, are thrown across and across, 
continually weaving the stuff of human exist- 
ence. From further off all these lights 
dwindle to a radiant semicircle that gazes 
out over the expanse with a quiet, mysterious 
expectancy. Far away seaward you may 
see the low golden glare of Coney Island. 

But there was beauty in the view that 
morning, also, half an hour after sunrise. 
New York, always the cleanest and least 
smoky of cities, lay asleep in a queer, pearly, 
hourless light. A thin mist softened the 
further outlines. The water was opalescent 
under a silver sky, cool and dim, very slightly 
ruffled by the sweet wind that followed us in 
from the sea. A few streamers of smoke flew 



ARRIVAL 7 

above the city, oblique and parallel, pennants 
of our civilisation. The space of water is 
great, and so the vast buildings do not tower 
above one as they do from the street. Scale 
is lost, and they might be any size. The 
impression is, rather, of long, low buildings 
stretching down to the water's edge on every 
side, and innumerable low black wharves 
and jetties and piers. And at one point, the 
lower end of the island on which the city 
proper stands, rose that higher clump of the 
great buildings, the Singer, the Woolworth, 
and the rest. Their strength, almost severity, 
of line and the lightness of their colour gave 
a kind of classical feeling, classical, and yet 
not of Europe. It had the air, this block of 
masonry, of edifices built to satisfy some faith, 
for more than immediate ends. Only, the 
faith was unfamiliar. But if these buildings 
embodied its nature, it is cold and hard and 
light, like the steel that is their heart. The 
first sight of these strange fanes has queer 
resemblances to the first sight of that lonely 
and secret group by Pisa's walls. It came 
upon me, at that moment, that they could 
not have been dreamed and made without 
some nobility. Perhaps the hour lent them 
sanctity. For I have often noticed since 



8 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

that in the early morning, and again for a 
Kttle about sunset, the sky-scrapers are no 
longer merely the means and local convenience 
for men to pursue their purposes, but acquire 
that characteristic of the great buildings of 
the world, an existence and meaning of their 
own. 

Our boat moved up the harbour and along 
the Hudson River with a superb and courteous 
stateliness. Round her snorted and scuttled 
and puffed the multitudinous strange deni- 
zens of the harbour. Tugs, steamers, queer- 
shaped ferry-boats, long rafts carrying great 
lines of trucks from railway to railway, 
dredgers, motor-boats, even a sailing-boat or 
two; for the day's work was beginning. 
Among them, with that majesty that only a 
liner entering a harbour has, she went, pro- 
gressed, had her moving — English contains 
no word for such a motion — "incessu patuit 
deaJ' A goddess entering fairyland, I thought; 
for the huddled beauty of these buildings and 
the still, silver expanse of the water seemed 
unreal. Then I looked down at the water 
immediately beneath me, and knew that 
New York was a real city. All kinds of refuse 
went floating by: bits of wood, straw from 
barges, bottles, boxes, paper, occasionally a 



ARRIVAL 9 

dead cat or dog, hideously bladder-Hke, its 
four paws stiff and indignant towards heaven. 
This analysis of fairyland turned me to- 
wards the statue of Liberty, already passed 
and growing distant. It is one of those 
things you have long wanted to see and 
haven't expected to admire, which, seen, 
give you a double thrill, that they're at last 
there, and that they're better than your hopes. 
For Liberty stands nobly. Americans, always 
shy about their country, have learnt from the 
ridicule which Europeans, on mixed aesthetic 
and moral grounds, pour on this statue, to 
dismiss it with an apologetic laugh. Yet it 
is fine — until you get near enough to see its 
clumsiness. I admired the great gesture of 
it. A hand fell on my shoulder, and a voice 
said, ''Look hard at that, young man ! 
That's the first time you've seen Liberty — and 
it will be the last till you turn your back on 
this country again." It was an American 
fellow-passenger, one of the tall, thin type of 
American, with pale blue eyes of an idealistic, 
disappointed expression, and an Indian profile. 
The other half of America, personated by a 
small, bumptious, eager, brown -faced man, with 
a cigar raking at an irritating angle from the 
corner of his mouth, joined in with, ''Wal! 



10 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

I should smile, I guess this is the Land of 
Freedom, anyway." The tall man swung 
round: "Freedom! do you call it a free 

land, where " He gave instances of the 

power of the dollar. The other man kept up 
the argument by spitting and by assevera- 
tion. As the busy little tugs, with rugs on 
their noses, butted the great liner into her 
narrow dock, the pessimist launched his last 
shafts. The short man denied nothing. He 
drew the cigar from his lips, shot it back with 
a popping noise into the round hole cigars 
had worn at the corner of his mouth, and 
said, "Anyway, it's some country." I was 
introduced to America. 



II 

NEW YORK 



II 

NEW YORK 

In five things America excels modern Eng- 
land — fish, architecture, jokes, drinks, and 
children's clothes. There may be others. Of 
these I am certain. The jokes and drinks, 
which curiously resemble each other, are the 
best. There is a cheerful violence about 
them; they take their respective kingdoms by 
storm. All the lesser things one has heard 
turn out to be delightfully true. The first 
hour in America proves them. People here 
talk with an American accent; their teeth 
are inlaid with gold; the mouths of car-con- 
ductors move slowly, slowly, with an oblique 
oval motion, for they are chewing; pave- 
ments are 'sidewalks.' It is all true. . . . 
But there were other things one expected, 
though in no precise form. What, for in- 
stance, would it be like, the feeling of what- 
ever democracy America has secured ? 

I landed, rather forlorn, that first morning, 
on the immense covered wharf where the 

13 



14 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

Customs mysteries were to be celebrated. 
The place was dominated by a large, dirty, 
vociferous man, coatless, in a black shirt and 
black apron. His mouth and jaw were huge; 
he looked like a caricaturist's Roosevelt, 
* Express Company' was written on his fore- 
head; labels of a thousand colours, printed 
slips, pencils and pieces of string, hung from 
his pockets and his hands, were held behind 
his ears and in his mouth. I laid my situa- 
tion and my incompetence before him, and 
learnt right where to go and right when to 
go there. Then he flung a vast, dingy arm 
round my shoulders, and bellowed, ''We'll 
have your baggage right along to your hotel 
in two hours." It was a Ue, but kindly. That 
grimy and generous embrace left me startled, 
but an initiate into Democracy. 

The other evening I went a lonely ramble, 
to try to detect the essence of New York. 
A wary eavesdropper can always surprise the 
secret of a city, through chance scraps of 
conversation, or by spying from a window, or 
by coming suddenly round corners. I started 
on a 'car.' American tram-cars are open 
all along the side and can be entered at any 
point in it. The side is divided by vertical 
bars. It looks like a cage with the horizontal 



NEW YORK 15 

lines taken out. Between these vertical bars 
you squeeze into the seat. If the seat oppo- 
site you is full, you swing yourself along the 
bars by your hands till you find room. The 
Americans become terrifyingly expert at this. 
I have seen them, fat, middle-aged business 
men, scampering up and down the face of 
the cars by means of their hands, swinging 
themselves over and round and above each 
other, like nothing in the world so much as 
the monkeys at the Zoo. It is a people in- 
formed with vital energy. I believe that this 
exercise, and the habit of drinking a lot of 
water between meals, are the chief causes of 
their good health. 

The Broadway car runs mostly along the 
backbone of the queer island on which this 
city stands. So the innumerable parallel 
streets that cross it curve down and away; 
and at this time street after street to the 
west reveals, and seems to drop into, a 
mysterious evening sky, full of dull reds and 
yellows, amber and pale green, and a few pink 
flecks, and in the midst, sometimes, the flushed, 
smoke- veiled face of the sun. Then greyness, 
broken by these patches of misty colour, 
settles into the lower channels of the New 
York streets; while the upper heights of the 



16 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

sky-scrapers, clear of the roofs, are still lit on 
the sunward side with a mellow glow, curi- 
ously serene. To the man in the mirk of the 
street, they seem to exude this light from the 
great spaces of brick. At this time the cars, 
always polyglot, are filled with shop-hands 
and workers, and no English at all is heard. 
One is surrounded with Yiddish, Italian, 
and Greek, broken by Polish, or Russian, 
or German. Some American anthropologists 
claim that the children of these immigrants 
show marked changes, in the shape of skull 
and face, towards the American type. It 
may be so. But the people who surround 
one are mostly European-born. They repre- 
sent very completely that H.C.F. of Conti- 
nental appearance which is labelled in the 
English mind 'looking like a foreigner'; 
being short, swarthy, gesticulatory, full of 
clatter, indeterminately alien. Only in their 
dress and gait have they — or at least the men 
among them — become at all American. 

The American by race walks better than 
we; more freely, with a taking swing, and 
almost with grace. How much of this is due 
to living in a democracy, and how much to 
wearing no braces, it is very difficult to 
determine. But certainly it is the land of 



NEW YORK 17 

belts, and therefore of more loosely moving 
bodies. This, and the padded shoulders of 
the coats, and the loosely-cut trousers, make 
a figure more presentable, at a distance, than 
most urban civilisations turn out. Also, 
Americans take their coats off, which is 
sensible; and they can do it the more beauti- 
fully because they are belted, and not braced. 
They take their coats off anywhere and any- 
when, and somehow it strikes the visitor as 
the most symbolic thing about them. They 
have not yet thought of discarding collars; 
but they are unashamedly shirt-sleeved. Any 
sculptor, seeking to figure this Republic in 
stone, must carve, in future, a young man in 
shirt-sleeves, open-faced, pleasant, and rather 
vulgar, straw hat on the back of his head, 
his trousers full and sloppy, his coat over his J 
arm. The motto written beneath will be, of 
course, 'This is some country.' The philo- 
sophic gazer on such a monument might get 
some way towards understanding the making 
of the Panama Canal, that exploit that no 
European nation could have carried out. 

What facial type the sculptor would give 
the youth is harder to determine, and very 
hard to describe. The American race seems 
to have developed two classes, and only two, 



18 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

the upper-middle and the lower-middle. Their 
faces are very distinct. The upper-class head 
is long, often fine about the forehead and eyes, 
and very cleanly outlined. The eyes have 
an odd, tired pathos in them — mixed with the 
friendliness that is so admirable — as if of a 
perpetual never quite successful effort to 
understand something. It is like the face 
of an only child who has been brought up in 
the company of adults. I am convinced it 
is partly due to the endeavour to set their 
standards by the culture and traditions of 
older nations. But the mouth of such men 
is the most typical feature. It is small, tight, 
and closed downwards at the corners, the 
lower lip very slightly protruding. It has 
little expression in it, and no curves. There 
the Puritan comes out. But no other nation 
has a mouth like this. It is shared to some 
extent by the lower classes; but their mouths 
tend to be wider and more expressive. Their 
foreheads are meaner, and their eyes hard, 
but the whole face rather more adaptive and 
in touch with life. These, anyhow, are the 
types that strike one in the Eastern cities. 
And there are intermediate varieties, as of 
the genial business-man, with the narrow 
forehead and the wide, smooth — the too wide 



NEW YORK 19 

and too smooth — lower face. Smoothness 
is the one unfaiUng characteristic. Why do 
American faces hardly ever wrinkle.^ Is it 
the absence of a soul.^ It must be. For it 
is less true of the Bostonian than of the 
ordinary business American, in whose life 
exhilaration and depression take the place of 
joy and suffering. The women's faces are 
more indeterminate, not very feminine; many 
of them wear those 'invisible' pince-nez 
which centre glitteringly about the bridge 
of the nose, and get from them a curious 
air of inteUigence. Handsome people of both 
sexes are very common; beautiful, and pretty, 
ones very rare. . . . 

I slipped from my car up about Fortieth 
Street, the region where the theatres and 
restaurants are, the 'roaring forties.' Broad- 
way here might be the offspring of Shaftesbury 
Avenue and Leicester Square, with, somehow, 
some of Fleet Street also in its ancestry. I 
passed two men on the sidewalk, their hats 
on the back of their heads, arguing fiercely. 
One had slightly long hair. The other looked 
the more truculent, and was saying to him, 
intensely, ''See here! We con — tracted with 
you to supply uS with sonnets at five dollars 
per sonnet " I passed up a side-street, one 



20 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

of those deserted ways that abound just 
oflF the big streets, resorts, apparently, for 
such people and things as are not quite 
strident or not quite energetic enough for the 
ordinary glare of life; dim places, fusty with 
hesternal excitements and the thrills of yester- 
year. Against a flight of desolate steps leant 
a notice. I stopped to read it. It said: 

"You must see Cookie, 
Positively the only bird that can both dance and sing. 
She is almost superhuman." 

There was no explanation; Cockie may have 
been dead for years. I went, musing on her 
possible fates, towards the pride and spacious- 
ness of Fifth Avenue. 

Fifth Avenue is handsome, the handsomest 
street imaginable. It is what the streets 
of German cities try to be. The buildings 
are large, square, 'imposing,' built with the 
solidity of opulence. The street, as a whole, 
has a character and an air of achievement. 
"Whatever else may be doubted or denied, 
American civilisation has produced this." One 
feels rich and safe as one walks. Back in 
Broadway, New York dropped her mask, and 
began to betray herself once again. A little 
crowd, expressionless, intent, and volatile, 



NEW YORK 21 

before a small shop, drew me. In the shop- 
window was a young man, pleasant-faced, a 
little conscious, and a little bored, dressed 
very lightly in what might have been a run- 
ner's costume. He was bowing, twisting, and 
posturing in a slow rhythm. From time to 
time he would put a large card on a little 
stand in the corner. The cards bore various 
legends. He would display a card that said, 
"this underwear does not impede the 
movement of the body in any direction." 
Then he moved his body in every direction, 
from position to position, probable or im- 
probable, and was not impeded. With a 
terrible dumb patience he turned the next 
card: ''it gives with the body in violent 
EXERCISING." The young man leapt suddenly, 
lunged, smote imaginary balls, belaboured 
invisible opponents, ran with immense speed 
but no progress, was thrown to earth by the 
Prince of the Air, kicked, struggled, then 
bounded to his feet again. But all this 
without a word. "It enables you to keep 
COOL WHILE EXERCISING." The youug man 
exercised, and yet was cool. He did this, 
I discovered later, for many hours a day. 

Not daring to imagine his state of mind, I 
hurried oflE through Union Square. One of 



22 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

the many daily fire-alarms had gone; the 
traffic was drawn to one side, and several 
fire-engines came, with clanging of bells and 
shouting, through the space, gleaming with 
brass, splendid in their purpose. Before the 
thrill in the heart had time to die, or the 
traffic to close up, swung through an immense 
open motor-car driven by a young mechanic. 
It was luxuriously appointed, and had the air 
of a private car being returned from repair- 
ing. The man in it had an almost Swinburnian 
mane of red hair, blowing back in the wind, 
catching the last lights of day. He was clad, 
as such people often are in this country these 
hot days, only in a suit of yellow overalls, so 
that his arms and shoulders and neck and chest 
were bare. He was big, well-made, and strong, 
and he drove the car, not wildly, but a little 
too fast, leaning back rather insolently, con- 
scious of power. In private life, no doubt, a 
very ordinary youth, interested only in base- 
ball scores; but in this brief passage he 
seemed like a Greek god, in a fantastically 
modern, yet not unworthy way emblemed and 
incarnate, or like the spirit of Henley's 'Song 
of Speed.' So I found a better image of 
America for my sculptor than the shirt- 
sleeved young man. 



Ill 

NEW YORK 



Ill 

NEW YORK (continued) 

The hotel into which the workings of blind 
chance have thrown me is given over to com- 
mercial travellers. Its life is theirs, and the 
few English tourists creep in and out with 
the shy, bewildered dignity of their race and 
class. These American commercial travellers 
are called 'drummers'; drummers in the most 
endless and pointless and extraordinary of 
wars. They have the air and appearance of 
devotees, men set aside, roaming preachers of 
a jehad whose meaning they have forgotten. 
They seem to be invariably of the short, dark 
type. The larger, fair-haired, long-headed 
men are common in business, but not in 
'drumming.' The drummer's eyes have a 
hard, rapt expression. He is not interested 
in the romance of the road, like an English 
commercial traveller, only in its ever-chang= 
ing end. These people are for ever sending 
off and receiving telegrams, messages, and 
cablegrams; they are continually telephoning; 

25 



26 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

stenographers are in waiting to record their 
inspirations. In the intervals of activity they 
relapse into a curious trance, husbanding their 
vitahty for the next crisis. I have watched 
them with terror and fascination. All day 
there are numbers of them sitting, immote and 
vacant, in rows and circles on the hard chairs 
in the hall. They are never smoking, never 
reading a paper, never even chewing. The 
expressions of their faces never change. It is 
impossible to guess what, or if anything, is in 
their minds. Hour upon hour they remain. 
Occasionally one will rise, in obedience to 
some call or revelation incomprehensible to 
us, and move out through the door into the 
clang and confusion of Broadway. 

It all confirms the impression that grows 
on the visitor to America that Business has 
developed insensibly into a ReUgion, in more 
than the light, metaphorical sense of the 
words. It has its ritual and theology, its high 
places and its jargon, as well as its priests and 
martyrs. One of its more mystical mani- 
festations is in advertisement. America has 
a childlike faith in advertising. They adver- 
tise here, everywhere, and in all ways. They 
shout your most private and sacred wants at 
your Nothing is untouched. Every day I 



NEW YORK 27 

pass a wall, some five hundred square feet of 
which a gentleman has taken to declare that 
he is 'out' to break the Undertakers' Trust. 
Half the advertisement is a coloured photo- 
graph of himself. The rest is, ''See what I 
give you for 75 dols. !" and a list of what 
he does give. He gives everything that 
the most morbid taphologist could suggest, 
beginning with "splendidly carved full-size 
oak casket, with black ivory handles. Four 
draped Flambeaux ..." and going on to 
funereal ingenuities that would have over- 
whelmed Mausolus, and make death impos- 
sible for a refined man. 

But there are heights as well as depths. 
I have been privileged with some intimate 
glances into the greatest of those peculiarly 
American institutions, the big departmental 
stores. Materially it is an immense building, 
containing all things that any upper-middle- 
class person could conceivably want. Such a 
store includes even Art, with the same bland 
omnipotence. If you wander into the*^Vast 
auditorium, it is equal chances whether you 
hear a work of Beethoven, Victor Herbert, 
Schonberg, or Mr Hirsch. If you are 'artistic,' 
you may choose between a large coloured 
photograph of the Eiffel Tower, a carbon 



%S LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

print of Botticelli, and a reproduction of an 
'improvisation' by Herr Kandinsky. You 
may buy an Elizabethan dining-table, a 
Grseco-Roman bronze, the latest dress de- 
signed by M. Bakst, or a packet of pins. Or 
you may sit and muse on the life of the 
employee of this place, who gets from it 
all that in less favoured civilisations family, 
guild, club, township, and nationality have 
given him or her. As a child he gets 
education, then evening-classes, continuation- 
schools, gymnasia, military training, swim- 
ming-baths, orchestra, facilities for the study 
of anything under the sun, from palaeography 
to Cherokee, libraries, holiday-camps, hospitals, 
ever-present medical attendance, and at the 
end a pension, and, I suppose, a store cemetery. 
And all for the price of a few hours' work a 
day, and a little loyalty to the 'establishment.' 
Can human hearts desire more.^ And, when 
all millionaires are as sensible, will they.^ 
In industries and businesses like this, where 
the majority of the employed are women, it 
ought to be a pretty stable sort of millennium. 
Men, perhaps, take longer to learn that kind 
of 'loyalty.' 

In one corner of this store is the advertis- 
ing department. There are gathered poets. 



NEW YORK 29 

artists, litterateurs, and mere intellectuals, all 
engaged in explaining to the upper middle- 
classes what there is for them to buy and why 
they should buy it. It is a life of good salary, 
steady hours, sufficient leisure, and entire 
dignity. There is no vulgarity in this advertis- 
ing, but the most perfect taste and great 
artistic daring and novelty. The most 'ad- 
vanced' productions of Europe are scanned 
for ideas and suggestions. Two of the leading 
young 'post-impressionist' painters in Paris, 
whose names are just beginning to be known 
in England, have been designing posters for 
this store for years. I stood and watched 
with awe a young American genius doing 
entirely Matisse-like illustrations to some 
notes on summer suitings. "We give our 
artists a free hand," said the very intelligent 
lady in charge of that section; "except, of 
course, for nudes or improprieties. And we 
don't allow any figures of people smoking. 
Some of our customers object very strongly. . ." 
Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at 
night. There comes an hour of evening when 
lower Broadway, the business end of the 
town, is deserted. And if, having felt your- 
self immersed in men and the frenzy of cities 
all day, you stand out in the street in this 



30 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

sudden hush, you will hear, like a strange 
questioning voice from another world, the 
melancholy boom of a foghorn, and realise 
that not half a mile away are the waters of 
the sea, and some great liner making its slow 
way out to the Atlantic. After that, the 
lights come out up-town, and the New York 
of theatres and vaudevilles and restaurants 
begins to roar and flare. The merciless lights 
throw a mask of unradiant glare on the 
human beings in the streets, making each 
face hard, set, wolfish, terribly blue. The 
chorus of voices becomes shriller. The build- 
ings tower away into obscurity, looking 
strangely theatrical, because lit from below. 
And beyond them soars the purple roof of 
the night. A stranger of another race, loiter- 
ing here, might cast his eyes up, in a vague 
wonder what powers, kind or maleficent, con- 
trolled or observed this whirlpool. He would 
find only this unresponsive canopy of black, 
unpierced even, if the seeker stood near a 
centre of lights, by any star. But while he 
looks, away up in the sky, out of the gulfs of 
night, spring two vast fiery tooth-brushes, 
erect, leaning towards each other, and hanging 
on to the bristles of them a little Devil, little 
but gigantic, who kicks and wriggles and 



NEW YORK 31 

glares. After a few moments the Devil, 
baffled by the firmness of the bristles, stops, 
hangs still, rolls his eyes, moon-large, and, in 
a fury of disappointment, goes out, leaving 
only the night, blacker and a little bewildered, 
and the unconscious throngs of ant-like human 
beings. Turning with terrified relief from 
this exhibition of diabolic impotence, the 
stranger finds a divine hand writing slowly 
across the opposite quarter of the heavens 
its igneous message of warning to the nations, 
"Wear Underwear for Youths and Men- 
Boys." And close by this message come forth 
a youth and a man-boy, flaming and immortal, 
clad in celestial underwear, box a short 
round, vanish, reappear for another round, 
and again disappear. Night after night they 
wage this combat. What gods they are who 
fight endlessly and indecisively over New 
York is not for our knowledge; whether it 
be Thor and Odin, or Zeus and Cronos, or 
Michael and Lucifer, or Ormuzd and Ahri- 
man, or Good-as-a-means and Good-as-an-end. 
The ways of our lords were ever riddling and 
obscure. To the right a celestial bottle, 
stretching from the horizon to the zenith, 
appears, is uncorked, and scatters the worlds 
with the foam of what ambrosial liquor may 



32 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

have been within. Beyond, a Spanish goddess, 
some minor deity in the Dionysian theogony, 
dances continually, rapt and mysterious, to 
the music of the spheres, her head in Cassiopeia 
and her twinkling feet among the Pleiades. 
And near her, Orion, archer no longer, releases 
himself from his strained posture to drive a 
sidereal golf -ball out of sight through the 
meadows of Paradise; then poses, addresses, 
and drives again. 

"O Nineveh, are these thy gods. 
Thine also, mighty Nineveh?" 

Why this theophany, or how the gods have 
got out to perform their various 'stunts' on 
the flammantia moenia mundi, is not asked by 
their incurious devotees. Through Broad- 
way the dingily glittering tide spreads itself 
over the sands of 'amusement.' Theatres 
and 'movies' are aglare. Cars shriek down 
the street; the Elevated train clangs and 
curves perilously overhead; newsboys wail 
the baseball news; wits cry their obscure 
challenges to one another, 'I should worry!' 
or 'She's some Daisy!' or 'Good-night, 
Nurse ! ' In houses off the streets around 
children are being born, lovers are kissing, 
people are dying. Above, in the midst of 



NEW YORK 33 

those coruscating divinities, sits one older and 
greater than any. Most colossal of all, it 
flashes momently out, a woman's head, all 
flame against the darkness. It is beautiful, 
passionless, in its simplicity and conventional 
representation queerly like an archaic Greek 
or early Egyptian figure. Queen of the night 
behind, and of the gods around, and of the 
city below — here, if at all, you think, may 
one find the answer to the riddle. Her 
ostensible message, burning in the firmament 
beside her, is that we should buy pepsin 
chewing-gum. But there is more, not to be 
given in words, ineffable. Suddenly, when 
she has surveyed mankind, sha closes her 
left eye. Three times she winks, and then 
vanishes. No ordinary winks these, but por- 
tentous, terrifyingly steady, obliterating a 
great tract of the sky. Hour by hour she 
does this, night by night, year by year. That 
enigmatic obscuration of Hght, that answer 
that is no answer, is, perhaps, the first thing 
in this world that a child born near here will 
see, and the last that a dying man will have 
to take for a message to the curious dead. 
She is immortal. Men have worshipped her 
as Isis and as Ashtaroth, as Venus, as Cybele, 
Mother of the Gods, and as Mary. There is 



34 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

a statue of her by the steps of the British 
Museum. Here, above the fantastic civiHsa- 
tion she observes, she has no name. She is 
older than the sky-scrapers amongst which 
she sits; and one, certainly, of her eyelids is 
a trifle weary. And the only answer to our 
cries, the only comment upon our cities, is 
that divine stare, the wink, once, twice, thrice. 
And then darkness. 



IV 
BOSTON AND HARVARD 



IV 

BOSTON AND HARVARD 

It is right to leave Boston late in a summer 
afternoon, and by sea. Naval departure is 
always the better. A train snatches you, 
hot, dusty, and smoky, with an irritated 
hurry out of the back parts of a town. The 
last glimpse of a place you may have grown 
to like or love is, ignobly, interminable rows 
of the bedroom-windows in mean streets, a 
few hovels, some cinder-heaps, and a factory 
chimney. As like as not, you are reft from 
a last wave to the city's unresponsive and 
dingy back by the roar and suffocation of a 
tunnel. By sea one takes a gracefuUer, more 
satisfactory farewell. 

Boston puts on her best appearance to 
watch our boat go out for New York. The 
harbour was bright with sunlight and blue 
water and little white sails and there wasn't 
more than the faintest smell of tea. The 
city sat primly on her little hills, decorous, 
civilised, European-looking. It is homely after 

37 



38 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

New York. The Boston crowd is curiously 
English. They have nice eighteenth-century 
houses there, and ivy grows on the buildings. 
And they are hospitable. All Americans are 
hospitable; but they haven't quite time in 
New York to practise the art so perfectly as 
the Bostonians. It is a lovely art. . . . But 
Boston also makes you feel at home without 
meaning to. A delicious ancient Toryism is 
to be found here. "What is wrong with 
America/' a middle-aged lady told me, "is 
this Democracy. They ought to take the 
votes away from these people, who don't 
know how to use them, and give them only 
to us, the Educated." My heart leapt the 
Atlantic, and was in a Cathedral or University 
town of South England. 

Yet Boston is alive. It sits, in comfortable 
middle-age, on the ruins of its glory. But it 
is not buried beneath them. It used to lead 
America in Literature, Thought, Art, every- 
thing. The years have passed. It is re- 
markable how nearly now Boston is to New 
York what Munich is to Berlin. Boston and 
Munich were the leaders forty years ago. 
.,, They can't quite make out that they aren't 
now. It is too incredible that Art should 
leave her goose-feather bed and away to the 



BOSTON AND HARVARD 39 

wraggle-taggle business-men. And certainly, 
if Berlin and New York are more 'live/ 
Boston and Munich are more themselves, less 
feverishly imitations of Paris. But the un- 
disputed palm is there no more; and its 
absence is felt. 

But I had little time to taste Boston itself. 
I was lured across the river to a place called 
Cambridge, where is the University of Harvard. 
Harvard is the Oxford and Cambridge of 
America, they claim. She has moulded the 
nation's leaders and uttered its ideals. Har- 
vard, Boston, New England, it is impossible to 
say how much they are interwoven, and how 
they have influenced America. I saw Harvard 
in 'Commencement,' which is Eights Week 
and May Week, the festive winding-up of the 
year, a time of parties and of valedictions. 
One of the great events of Commencement, 
and of the year, is the Harvard-Yale baseball 
match. To this I went, excited at the pros- 
pect of my first sight of a 'ball game,' and 
my mind vaguely reminiscent of the indolent, 
decorous, upper-class crowd, the sunlit spaces, 
the dignified ritual, and white-flannelled grace 
of Lord's at the 'Varsity cricket match. The 
crowd was gay, and not very large. We sat 
in wooden stands, which were placed in the 



40 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

shape of a large V. As all the hitting which 
counts in baseball takes place well in front 
of the wicket, so to speak, the spectators have 
the game right under their noses; the striker 
stands in the angle of the V and plays out- 
wards. The field was a vast place, partly- 
stubbly grass, partly worn and patchy, like a 
parade-ground. Beyond it lay the river; 
beyond that the town of Cambridge and the 
University buildings. Around me were under- 
graduates, with their mothers and sisters. 
'Cambridge'! . . . but there entered to us, 
across the field, a troop of several hundred 
men, all dressed in striped shirts of the same 
hue and pattern, and headed by a vast banner 
which informed the world that they were the 
graduates of 1910, celebrating their triennial. 
In military formation they moved across the 
plain towards us, led by a band, ceaselessly 
vociferating, and raising their straw hats in 
unison to mark the time. There followed the 
class of 1907, attired as sailors; 1903, the 
decennial class, with some samples of their 
male children marching with them, and a 
banner inscribed ^'515 Others. No Race 
Suicide"; 1898, carefully arranged in an 
H-shaped formation, dancing along to their 
music with a slow polka-step, each with his 



BOSTON AND HARVARD 41 

hands on the shoulders of the man in front, 
and at the head of all their leader, dancing 
backwards in perfect time, marshalling them; 
1888, middle-aged men, again with some 
children, and a Highland regiment playing 
the bagpipes. 

When these had passed to the seats allotted 
for them, I had time to observe the players, 
who were practising about the ground, and I 
was shocked. They wear dust-coloured shirts 
and dingy knickerbockers, fastened under the 
knee, and heavy boots. They strike the 
English eye as being attired for football, or 
a gladiatorial combat, rather than a summer 
game. The very close-fitting caps, with large 
peaks, give them picturesquely the appearance 
of hooligans. Baseball is a good game to 
watch, and in outline easy to understand, as 
it is merely glorified rounders. A cricketer is 
fascinated by their rapidity and skill in catch- 
ing and throwing. There is excitement in 
the game, but little beauty except in the 
long-limbed 'pitcher,' whose duty it is to 
hurl the ball rather further than the length 
of a cricket-pitch, as bewilderingly as possible. 
In his efforts to combine speed, mystery, 
and curve, he gets into attitudes of a very 
novel and fantastic, but quite obvious, 



42 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

beauty. M. Nijinsky would find them repay 
study. 

One queer feature of this sport is that un- 
occupied members of the batting side, fielders, 
and even spectators, are accustomed to join in 
vocally. You have the spectacle of the rep- 
resentatives of the universities endeavouring 
to frustrate or unnerve their opponents, at 
moments of excitement, by cries of derision 
and mockery, or heartening their own sup- 
porters and performers with exclamations of 
'Now, Joe!' or 'He's got them!' or 'He's 
the boy ! ' At the crises in the fortunes of 
the game, the spectators take a collective 
and important part. The Athletic Committee 
appoints a 'cheer-leader' for the occasion. 
Every five or ten minutes this gentleman, a 
big, fine figure in white, springs out from his 
seat at the foot of the stands, addresses 
the multitude through a megaphone with a 
'One ! Two ! Three !' hurls it aside, and, with 
a wild flinging and swinging of his body and 
arms, conducts ten thousand voices in the 
Harvard yell. That over, the game proceeds, 
and the cheer-leader sits quietly waiting for 
the next moment of peril or triumph. I shall 
not easily forget that figure, bright in the 
sunshine, conducting with his whole body, 



BOSTON AND HARVARD 43 

passionate, possessed by a demon, bounding 
in the frenzy of his inspiration from side to 
side, contorted, rhythmic, ecstatic. It seemed 
so wonderfully American, in its combination 
of entire wildness and entire regulation, with 
the whole just a trifle fantastic. Completely 
friendly and befriended as I was, I couldn't 
help feeling at those moments very alien and 
very, very old — even more so than after the 
protracted game had ended in a victory for 
Harvard, when the dusty plain was filled with 
groups and lines of men dancing in solemn 
harmony, and a shouting crowd, broken by 
occasional individuals who could find some 
little eminence to lead a Harvard yell from, 
and who conducted the bystanders, and then 
vanished, and the crowd swirled on again. 

Different enough was the scene next day, 
when all Harvard men who were up for Com- 
mencement assembled and, arranged by years, 
marched round the yard. Class by class they 
paraded, beginning with veterans of the 
'fifties, down to the class of 1912. I wonder ^ 
if English nerves could stand it. It seems 
to bring the passage of time so very presently 
and vividly to the mind. To see, with such 
emphatic regularity, one's coevals changing 
in figure, and diminishing in number, summer 



44 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

after summer! . . . Perhaps it is nobler, 
this dehberate viewing of oneself as part of 
the stream. To the spectator, certainly, the 
flow and transiency become apparent and 
poignant. In five minutes fifty years of 
America, of so much of America, go past one. 
The shape of the bodies, apart from the 
effects of age, the lines of the faces, the ways 
of wearing hair and beard and moustaches, all 
these change a little decade by decade, before 
your eyes. And through the whole appear- 
ance runs some continuity, which is Harvard. 
The orderly progression of the years was 
unbroken, except at one point. There was 
one gap, large and arresting. Though all 
years were represented, there seemed to be 
nobody in the procession between fifty and 
sixty. I asked a Harvard friend the reason. 
''The War," he said. He told me there had 
always been that gap. Those who were old 
enough to be conscious of the war had lost 
a big piece of their lives. With their suc- 
cessors a new America began. I don't know 
how true it is. Certainly, the dates worked out 
right. And I met an American on a boat who 
had been a child in one of the neutral States. 
He used to watch the regiments forming in the 
main street of his town, and marching out, some 



BOSTON AND HARVARD 45 

north and some south. He said it felt as though 
pieces of his body were being torn in different 
directions. And he was only nine. 

The procession filed in to an open court, to 
hear the speeches of the recipients of honorary 
degrees, and the President's annual statement. 
There was still, in every sense, a solemn 
atmosphere. The President's speech floated 
out into the great open space; fragments of it 
were blown to one's ears concerning deaths, and 
the spirit of the place, and a detailed account 
of the money given during the year. Eleven 
hundred thousand dollars in all — a record, 
or nearly a record. We roared applause. The 
American universities appear still to dream of 
the things of this world. They keep putting up 
the most wonderful and expensive buildings. 
But they do not pay their teachers well. 

Yet Harvard is a spirit, a way of looking at 
things, austerely refined, gently moral, kindly. 
The perception of it grows on the foreigner. 
Its charm is so deliciously old in this land, so 
deliciously young compared with the lovely 
frowst of Oxford and Cambridge. You see it 
in temperament, the charm of simplicity and 
good-heartedness and culture; in the Harvard 
undergraduate, who is a boy, while his English 
contemporary is either a young man or a 



46 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

schoolboy, less pleasant stages; and in the 
old Bostonian who heard, and still hears, 
the lectures of Dickens and Thackeray. Class 
Day brings so many of that older generation 
together. They reveal what Harvard, what 
Boston, was. There is something terrifying 
in the completeness of their lives and their 
civilisation. They are like a company of dons 
whose studies are of a remote and finished 
world. But the subject of their scholarship 
is the Victorian age, and especially Victorian 
England. Hence their liveliness and certainty, 
greater than men can reach who are concerned 
with the dubieties and changes of incomplete 
things. Hence the wit, the stock of excellent 
stories, the wrinkled wisdom and mirth of the 
type. They are the flower of a civilisation, 
its ripest critics, and final judges. Carlyle 
and Emerson are their greatest living heroes. 
One of them bent the kindliness and alert 
interest of his eighty years upon me. "So 
you come from Rugby," he said. "^Tell me, 
do you know that curious creature, Matthew 
Arnold.^" I couldn't bring myself to tell 
him that, even in Rugby, we had forgiven 
that brilliant youth his iconoclastic tendencies 
some time since, and that, as a matter of fact, 
he had died when I was eight months old. 



V 
MONTREAL AND OTTAWA 



MONTREAL AND OTTAWA 

My American friends were full of kindly 
scorn when I announced that I was going to 
Canada. 'A country without a soul!' they 
cried, and pressed books upon me, to befriend 
me through that Philistine bleakness. Their 
commiseration unnerved me, but I was 
heartened by a feeling that I was, in a sense, 
going home, and by the romance of journeying. 
There was romance in the long grim American 
train, in the great lake we passed in the 
blackest of nights, and could just see glinting 
behind dark trees; in the negro car-attendant; 
in the boy who perpetually cried: 'Pea-nuts! 
Candy!' up and down the long carriages; 
in the lofty box they put me in to sleep; and 
in the fat old lady who had the berth under 
mine, and snored shrilly the whole night 
through. There was almost romance, even, in 
the fact that after all there was no restaurant- 
car on the train; and, having walked all day 
in the country, I dined off an orange. 

49 



50 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

I suppose an Englishman in another country, 
if he is simple enough, is continually and alter- 
nately struck by two thoughts: 'How like 
England this is!' and 'How unlike England 
// this is ! ' When I had woken next morning, 
and, lying on my back, had got inside my 
clothes with a series of fish-like jumps, I found 
myself looking with startled eyes out of the 
window at the largest river I had ever seen. 
It was blue, and sunlit, and it curved spa- 
ciously. But beyond that we ran into the 
squalider parts of a city. It became immedi- 
ately obvious that we were not in New York 
or Boston or any of the more orderly, the 
rather foreign, cities of America. There was 
something in the untidiness of those grimy 
houses, the smoky disorder of the backyards, 
that ran a thrill of nostalgia through me. I rec- 
ognised the English way of doing things— with 
a difference that I could not define till later. 

Determined to be in all ways the complete 
tourist, I took a rough preliminary survey of 
Montreal in an 'observation-car.' It was a 
large motor-wagonette, from which every- 
thing in Montreal could be seen in two hours. 
We were a most fortuitous band of twenty, 
who had elected so to see it. Our guide 
addressed us from the front through a small 



MONTREAL AND OTTAWA 51 

megaphone, telling us what everything was, 
what we were to be interested in, what to 
overlook, what to admire. He seemed the 
exact type of a spiritual pastor and master, 
shepherding his stolid and perplexed flock 
on a regulated path through the dust and 
clatter of the world. And the great hollow 
device out of which our instruction proceeded 
was so perfectly a blind mouth. I had never 
understood Lycidas before. We were sheepish 
enough, and fairly hungry. However, we were 
excellently fed. "On the right, ladies and 
gentlemen, is the Bank of Montreal; on the 
left the Presbyterian Church of St Andrew's; 
on the right, again, the well-designed residence 
of Sir Blank Blank; further on, on the same 
side, the Art Museum. . . ." The outcome 
of it all was a vague general impression that 
Montreal consists of banks and churches. 
The people of this city spend much of their 
time in laying up their riches in this world or 
the next. Indeed, the British part of Montreal 
is dominated by the Scotch race; there is a 
Scotch spirit sensible in the whole place. The 
rather narrow, rather gloomy streets, the solid, 
square, grey, aggressively prosperous build- 
ings, the general greyness of the city, the air 
of dour prosperity. Even the Canadian habit 



52 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

of loading the streets with heavy telephone 
wires, supported by frequent black poles, 
seemed to increase the atmospheric resem- 
blance to Glasgow. 

But besides all this there is a kind of re- 
straint in the air, due, perhaps, to a state of 
affairs which, more than any other, startles 
the ordinary ignorant English visitor. The 
average man in England has an idea of Canada 
as a young-eyed daughter State, composed of 
millions of wheat-growers and backwoodsmen 
of British race. It surprises him to learn 
that more than a quarter of the population 
is of French descent, that many of them 
cannot speak English, that they control a 
province, form the majority in the biggest 
city in Canada, and are a perpetual complica- 
tion in the national politics. Even a stranger 
who knows this is startled at the complete 
separateness of the two races. Inter-marriage 
is very rare. They do not meet socially; 
only on business, and that not often. In the 
same city these two communities dwell side 
by side, with different traditions, different 
languages, different ideals, without sympathy 
or comprehension. The French in Canada 
are entirely devoted to — some say under the 
thumb of — the Roman Catholic Church. They 



MONTREAL AND OTTAWA 53 

seem like a piece of the Middle Ages, dumped 
after a trans-secular journey into a quite 
uncompromising example of our commercial 
time. Some of their leaders are said to have 
dreams of a French Republic — or theocracy — 
on the banks of the St Lawrence. How this, 
or any other, solution of the problem is to 
come about, no man knows. Racial diflS- 
culties are the most enduring of all. The 
French and British in Canada seem to have 
behaved with quite extraordinary generosity 
and kindliness towards each other. No one 
is to blame. But it is not in human nature 
that two communities should live side by side, 
pretending they are one, without some irrita- 
tion and mutual loss of strength. There is 
no open strife. But 'incidents,' and the 
memory of incidents, bear continual witness 
to the truth of the situation. And racial 
disagreement is at the bottom, often uncon- 
sciously, of many political and social move- 
ments. Sir Wilfrid Laurier performed a 
miracle. But no one of French birth will ever 
again be Premier of Canada. 

Montreal and Eastern Canada suffer from 
that kind of ill-health which afflicts men who 
are cases of 'double personality' — debility 
and spiritual paralysis. The 'progressive' 



54 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

British-Canadian man of commerce is comic- 
ally desperate of peasants who will not under- 
stand that increase of imports and volume of 
trade and numbers of millionaires are the 
measures of a city's greatness; and to his eye 
the Roman Catholic Church, with her invalu- 
able ally Ignorance, keeps up her incessant 
war against the general good of the community 
of which she is part. So things remain, 

I made my investigations in Montreal. I 
have to report that the Discobolus^ is very 
well, and, nowadays, looks the whole world 
in the face, almost quite unabashed. West 
of Montreal, the country seems to take on 
a rather more English appearance. There 
is still a French admixture. But the little 
houses are not purely Gallic, as they are along 
the Lower St Lawrence; and once or twice I 
detected real hedges. 

Ottawa came as a relief after Montreal. 
There is no such sense of strain and tightness 
in the atmosphere. The British, if not greatly 
in the majority, are in the ascendency; also, 
the city seems conscious of other than financial 
standards, and quietly, with dignity, aware 
of her own purpose. The Canadians, like the 
Americans, chose to have for their capital a 

^See Samuel Butler's poem, "Oh God ! oh Montreal !" — Ed. 



MONTREAL AND OTTAWA 55 

city which did not lead in population or in 
wealth. This is particularly fortunate in 
Canada, an extremely individualistic country, 
whose inhabitants are only just beginning to 
be faintly conscious of their nationality. Here, 
at least, Canada is more than the Canadian. 
A man desiring to praise Ottawa would begin 
to do so without statistics of wealth and the 
growth of population; and this can be said 
of no other city in Canada except Quebec. 
Not that there are not immense lumber-mills 
and the rest in Ottawa. But the Govern- 
ment farm, and the Parliament buildings, are 
more important. Also, although the 'spoils' 
system obtains a good deal in this country, 
the nucleus of the Civil Service is much the 
same as in England; so there is an atmosphere 
of Civil Servants about Ottawa, an atmosphere 
of safeness and honour and massive buildings 
and well-shaded walks. After all, there is in 
the qualities of Civility and Service much 
beauty, of a kind which would adorn Canada. 
Parliament Buildings stand finely on a head- 
land of cliff some 160 feet above the river. 
There are gardens about them; and beneath, 
the wooded rocks go steeply down to the 
water. It is a position of natural boldness 
and significance. The buildings were put up 



56 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

in the middle of last century, an unfortunate 
period. But they have dignity, especially 
of line; and when evening hides their colour, 
and the western sky and the river take on 
the lovely hues of a Canadian sunset, and the 
lights begin to come out in the city, they seem 
to have the majesty and calm of a natural 
crown of the river-headland. The Govern- 
ment have bought the ground along the cliff 
for half a mile on either side, and propose to 
build all their offices there. So, in the end, 
if they build well, the river-front at Ottawa 
will be a noble sight. And — ^just to show that 
it is Canada, and not Utopia — the line of 
national buildings will always be broken by 
an expensive and superb hotel the Canadian 
Pacific Railway has been allowed to erect on 
the twin and neighbouring promontory to 
that of the Houses of Parliament. 

The streets of Ottawa are very quiet, and 
shaded with trees. The houses are mostly 
of that cool, homely, wooden kind, with 
verandahs, on which, or on the steps, the 
whole family may sit in the evening and 
observe the passers-by. This is possible for 
both the rich and the poor, who live nearer 
each other in Ottawa than in most cities. In 
general there is an air of civilisation, which 



MONTREAL AND OTTAWA 57 

extends even over the country round. But 
in the country you see Httle signs, a patch of 
swamp, or thickets of still untouched primaeval 
wood, which remind you that Europeans have 
not long had this land. I was taken in a 
motor-car some twenty miles or more over 
the execrable roads round here, to a lovely 
little lake in the hills north-west of Ottawa. 
We went by little French villages and fields 
at first, and then through rocky, tangled woods 
of birch and poplar, rich with milk-weed and 
blue cornflowers, and the aromatic thimble- 
berry blossom, and that romantic, light, 
purple-red flower which is called fireweed, 
because it is the first vegetation to spring up 
in the prairie after a fire has passed over, and 
so might be adopted as the emblematic fiower 
of a sense of humour. They told me, casually, 
that there was nothing but a few villages 
between me and the North Pole. It is probably 
true of several commonly frequented places in 
this country. But it gives a thrill to hear it. 
But what Ottawa leaves in the mind is a 
certain graciousness — dim, for it expresses a 
barely materialised national spirit — and the 
sight of kindly English-looking faces, and the 
rather lovely sound of the soft Canadian 
accent in the streets. 



VI 
QUEBEC AND THE SAGUENAY 



VI 

QUEBEC AND THE SAGUENAY 

The boat starts from Montreal one evening, 
and lands you in Quebec at six next morning. 
The evening I left was a dull one. Heavy 
sulphurous clouds hung low over the city, 
drifting very slowly and gloomily out across 
the river. Mount Royal crouched, black and 
sullen, in the background, its crest occluded 
by the darkness, appearing itseK a cloud 
materialised, resting on earth. The harbour 
was filled with volumes of smoke, purple and 
black, wreathing and sidling eastwards, from 
steamers and chimneys. The gigantic ele- 
vators and other harbour buildings stood 
mistily in this inferno, their heads clear and 
sinister above the mirk. It was impossible to 
decide whether an enormous mass of pitchy 
and Tartarian gloom was being slowly moulded 
by diabolic invisible hands into a city, or a 
city, the desperate and damned abode of a 
loveless race, was disintegrating into its proper 
fume and dusty chaos. With relief we turned 

61 



6£ LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

outwards to the nobility of the St Lawrence 
and the gathering dark. 

On the boat I fell in with another wanderer, 
an American Jew, and we joined our fortunes, 
rather loosely, for a few days. He was one 
of those men whom it is a life-long pleasure 
to remember. I can record his existence the 
more easily that there is not the slightest 
chance of him ever reading these lines. He 
was a fat, large man of forty-five, obviously 
in business and probably of a mediocre suc- 
cess. His eyes were light-coloured, very small, 
always watery, and perpetually roving. The 
lower part of his face was clean-shaven and 
very broad; his mouth wide, with thin, moist, 
colourless lips; his nose fat and Hebraic. He 
was rather bald. He had respect for Montreal, 
because, though closed to navigation for five 
months in the year, it is the second busiest 
port on the coast. He said it had Boston 
skinned. The French he disliked. He thought 
they stood in the way of Canada's progress. 
His mind was even more childlike and trans- 
parent than is usual with business men. The 
observer could see thoughts slowly floating 
into it, like carp in a pond. When they got 
near the surface, by a purely automatic process 
they found utterance. He was almost com- 



QUEBEC AND THE SAGUENAY 63 

pletely unconscious of an audience. Every- 
thing he thought of he said. He told me that 
his boots were giving in the sole, but would 
probably last this trip. He said he had not 
washed his feet for eight days; and that his 
clothes were shabby (which was true), but 
would do for Canada. It was interesting to 
see how Canada presented herself to that 
mind. He seemed to regard her as a kind 
of Boeotia, and terrifyingly dour. ''These 
Canadian waiters," he said, "they jes' fling 
the food in y'r face. Kind'er gets yer sick, 
doesn't it.^" I agreed. There was a York- 
shire mechanic, too, who had been in Canada 
four years, and preferred it to England, ''be- 
cause you've room to breathe," but also found 
that Canada had not yet learnt social com- 
fort, and regretted the manners of "the Old 
Country." 

We woke to find ourselves sweeping round 
a high cliff, at six in the morning, with a lively 
breeze, the river very blue and broken into 
ripples, and a lot of little white clouds in the 
sky. The air was full of gaiety and sunshine 
and the sense of the singing of birds, though 
actually, I think, there were only a few gulls 
crying. It was the perfection of a summer 
morning, thrilling with a freshness which, the 



64 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

fancy said, was keener than any the old world 
knew. And high and grey and serene above 
the morning lay the citadel of Quebec. Is 
there any city in the world that stands so 
nobly as Quebec.^ The citadel crowns a 
headland, three hundred feet high, that juts 
boldly out into the St Lawrence. Up to it, 
up the side of the hill, clambers the city, houses 
and steeples and huts, piled one on the other. 
It has the individuahty and the pride of a city 
where great things have happened, and over 
which many years have passed. Quebec is 
as refreshing and as definite after the other 
cities of this continent as an immortal among 
a crowd of stockbrokers. She has, indeed, 
the radiance and repose of an immortal; but 
she wears her immortality youthfully. When 
you get among the streets of Quebec, the 
mediaeval, precipitous, narrow, winding, and 
perplexed streets, you begin to realise her 
charm. She almost incurs the charge of 
quaintness (abhorrent quality!); but even 
quaintness becomes attractive in this country. 
You are in a foreign land, for the people have 
an alien tongue, short stature, the quick, 
decided, cinematographic quality of move- 
ment, and the inexplicable cheerfulness which 
mark a foreigner. You might almost be in 



QUEBEC AND THE SAGUENAY 65 

Siena or some old German town, except that 
Quebec lias lier street-cars and grain-elevators 
to show that she is living. 

The American Jew and I took a caleche, a 
little two-wheeled local carriage, driven by a 
lively Frenchman with a factitious passion 
for death-spots and churches. A small black 
and white spaniel followed the caleche, yapping. 
The American's face shone with interest. 
''That dawg's Michael," he said, ''the hotel 
dawg. He's a queer little dawg. I kicked his 
face; and he tried to bite me. Hup, Michael ! " 
And he laughed hoarsely. "Non!" said 
the driver suddenly, "it is not the 'otel 
dog." The American did not lose interest. 
"These little dawgs are all alike," he said. 
"Dare say if you kicked that dawg in 
the face, he'd bite you. Hup, Michael!" 
With that he fell into deep thought. 

We rattled up and down the steep streets, 
out among tidy fields, and back into the 
noisily sedate city again. We saw where 
Wolfe fell, where Montcalm fell, where Mont- 
gomery fell. Children played where the tides 
of war had ebbed and flowed. Mr Norman 
Angell and his friends tell us that trade is 
superseding war; and pacifists declare that 
for the future countries will win their pride 



66 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

or shame from commercial treaties and tariffs 
and bounties, and no more from battles and 
sieges. And there is a part of Canadian 
patriotism that has progressed this way. But 
I wonder if the hearts of that remarkable race, 
posterity, will ever beat the harder when they 
are told, "Here Mr Borden stood when he 
decided to double the duty on agricultural 
implements," or even "In this room Mr Ritchie 
conceived the plan of removing the shilling 
on wheat." When that happens, Quebec will 
be a forgotten ruin. . . . The reverie was 
broken by my friend struggling to his feet 
and standing, unsteady and bareheaded, in the 
swaying carriage. In that position he burst 
hoarsely into a song that I recognised as 'The 
Star-Spangled Banner.' We were passing the 
American Consulate. His song over, he settled 
down and fell into a deep sleep, and the 
caleche jolted down even narrower streets, 
curiously paved with planks, and ways that 
led through and under the ancient, tottering 
wooden houses. 

But Quebec is too real a city to be 'seen' 
in such a manner. And a better way of 
spending a few days, or years, is to sit on 
Dufferin Terrace, with the old Lower Town 
sheer beneath you, and the river beyond it. 



QUEBEC AND THE SAGUENAY 67 

and the citadel to the right, a Httle above, 
and the Isle of Orleans and the French villages 
away down-stream to your left. Hour by 
hour the colours change, and sunlight follows 
shadow, and mist rises, and smoke drifts 
across. And through the veil of the shifting 
of lights and hues there remains visible the 
majesty of the most glorious river in the world. 
From this contemplation, and from musing 
on men's agreement to mark by this one great 
sign of the Taking of the Heights of Quebec, 
the turning of one of the greatest currents in 
our history, I was torn by a journey I had been 
advised to make. The boat goes some hundred 
and thirty miles down the St Lawrence, turns 
up a northern tributary, the Saguenay, goes 
as far as Chicoutimi, ninety miles up, and 
returns to Quebec. Both on this trip, and 
between Quebec and Montreal, we touched at 
many little French villages, by day and by 
night. Their habitants, the French-Canadian 
peasants, are a jolly sight. They are like 
children in their noisy content. They are 
poor and happy, Roman Catholics; they laugh 
a great deal; and they continually sing. They 
do not progress at all. As a counter to these 
admirable people we had on our boat a great 
many priests. They diffused an atmosphere 



68 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

of black, of unpleasant melancholy. Their 
face had that curiously unwashed look, and 
were for the most part of a mean and very 
untrustworthy expression. Their eyes were 
small, shifty, and cruel, and would not meet 
the gaze. . . . The choice between our own 
age and mediaeval times is a very hard one. 

It was almost full night when we left the 
twenty-mile width of the St Lawrence, and 
turned up a gloomy inlet. By reason of the 
night and of comparison with the river from 
which we had come, this stream appeared un- 
naturally narrow. Darkness hid all detail, 
and we were only aware of vast cliflfs, some- 
times dense with trees, sometimes bare faces 
of sullen rock. They shut us in, oppressively, 
but without heat. There are no banks to this 
river, for the most part; only these walls, 
rising sheer from the water to the height of 
two thousand feet, going down sheer beneath 
it, or rather by the side of it, to many times 
that depth. The water was of some colour 
blacker than black. Even by daylight it is 
inky and sinister. It flows without foam or 
ripple. No white showed in the wake of the 
boat. The ominous shores were without sign 
of life, save for a rare light every few miles, 
to mark some bend in the chasm. Once a 



QUEBEC AND THE SAGUENAY 69 

canoe with two Indians shot out of the shadows, 
passed under our stern, and vanished silently 
down-stream. We all became hushed and 
apprehensive. The night was gigantic and 
terrible. There were a few stars, but the 
flood slid along too swiftly to reflect them. 
The whole scene seemed some Stygian imag- 
ination of Dante. As we drew further and 
further into that lightless land, little twists 
and curls of vapour wriggled over the black 
river-surface. Our homeless, irrelevant, tiny 
steamer seemed to hang between two abysms. 
One became suddenly aware of the miles of 
dark water beneath. I found that under a 
prolonged gaze the face of the river began to 
writhe and eddy, as if from some horrible 
suppressed emotion. It seemed likely that 
something might appear. I reflected that if 
the river failed us, all hope was gone; and 
that anyhow this region was the abode of 
devils. I went to bed. 

Next day we steamed down the river again. 
By daylight some of the horror goes, but the 
impression of ancientness and desolation re- 
mains. The gloomy flood is entirely shut in 
by the rock or the tangled pine and birch 
forests of these great cliffs, except in one or 
two places, where a chine and a beach have 



70 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

given lodging to lonely villages. One of these 
is at the end of a long bay, called Ha-Ha 
Bay. The local guide-book, an early example 
of the school of fantastic realism so popular 
among our younger novelists, says that this 
name arose from the 'laughing ejaculations' 
of the early French explorers, who had mis- 
taken this lengthy blind-alley for the main 
stream. 'Ha! Ha!' they said. So like an 
early explorer. 

At the point where the Saguenay joins 
the St Lawrence, here twenty miles wide, I 
'stopped off' for a day, to feel the country 
more deeply. The village is called Tadousac, 
and consists of an hotel and French fishermen, 
to whom Quebec is a distant, unvisited city 
of legend. The afternoon was very hot. I 
wandered out along a thin margin of yellow 
sand to the extreme rocky point where the 
waters of the two rivers meet and swirl. There 
I lay, and looked at the strange humps of the 
Laurentian hills, and the dark green masses 
of the woods, impenetrable depths of straight 
and leaning and horizontal trees, broken here 
and there by great bald granite rocks, and 
behind me the little village, where the earliest 
church in Canada stands. Away in the St 
Lawrence there would be a flash as an immense 



QUEBEC AND THE SAGUENAY 71 

white fish jumped. Miles out an occasional 
steamer passed, bound to England perhaps. 
And once, hugging the coast, came a half- 
breed paddling a canoe, with a small diamond- 
shaped sail, filled with trout. The cliff above 
me was crowned with beds of blue flowers, 
whose names I did not know. Against the 
little gulfs and coasts of rock at my feet were 
washing a few white logs of driftwood. I 
wondered if they could have floated across 
from England, or if they could be from 
the Titanic. The sun was very hot, the sky 
a clear light blue, almost cloudless, like an 
English sky, and the water seemed fairly 
deep. I stripped, hovered a while on the brink, 
and plunged. The current was unexpectedly 
strong. I seemed to feel that two-mile-deep 
body of black water moving against me. 
And it was cold as death. Stray shreds of 
the St Lawrence water were warm and cheer- 
ful. But the current of the Saguenay, on 
such a day, seemed unnaturally icy. As my 
head came up I made one dash for the land, 
scrambled out on the hot rocks, and lay there 
panting. Then I dried on a handkerchief, 
dressed, and ran back home, still shivering, 
through the woods to the hotel. 



vn 

ONTARIO 



VII 

ONTARIO 

The great joy of travelling in Canada is to do 
it by water. The advantage of this is that 
you can keep fairly clean and quiet of nerves; 
the disadvantage is that you don't 'see the 
country.' I travelled most of the way from 
Ottawa to Toronto by water. But between 
Ottawa and Prescott then, and later from 
Toronto to Niagara Falls, and thence to 
Sarnia, there is a good deal of Southern 
Ontario to be seen— the part which has counted 
as Ontario so far. And I saw it through a 
faint grey-pink mist of Heimweh. For after 
the States and after Quebec it is English. 
There are weather-beaten farm-houses, rolling 
country, thickets of trees, little hills green and 
grey in the distance, decorous small fields, 
orchards, and, I swear, a hedge or two. Most 
of the towns we went through are a little too 
vivacious or too pert to be European. But 
there seemed to be real villages occasionally, 
and the land had a quiet air of occupation. 

75 



76 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

Men have lived contentedly on this land and 
died where they were born, and so given it a 
certain sanctity. Away north the wild begins, 
and is only now being brought into civilisa- 
tion, inhabited, made productive, explored, 
and exploited. But this country has seen the 
generations pass, and won something of that 
repose and security which countries acquire 
from the sight. 

The wise traveller from Ottawa to Toronto 
catches a boat at Prescott, and puffs judicially 
between two nations up the St Lawrence and 
across Lake Ontario. We were a cosmopolitan, 
middle-class bunch (it is the one distinction 
between the Canadian and American languages 
that Canadians tend to say 'bunch' but 
Americans 'crowd'), out to enjoy the scenery. 
For this stretch of the river is notoriously 
picturesque, containing the Thousand Isles. 
The Thousand Isles vary from six inches to 
hundreds of yards in diameter. Each, if big 
enough, has been bought by a rich man — 
generally an American — who has built a castle 
on it. So the whole isn't much more beautiful 
than Golder's Green. We picked our way 
carefully between the islands. The Americans 
on board sat in rows saying "That house was 
built by Mr . Made his money in biscuits. 



ONTARIO 77 

Cost three hundred thousand dollars, e-recting 
that building. Yessir." The Canadians sat 
looking out the other way, and said, ''In 
nineteen-ten this land was worth twenty 
thousand an acre; now it's worth forty-five 
thousand. Next year ..." and their eyes 
grew solemn as the eyes of men who think 
deep and holy thoughts. But the English sat 
quite still, looking straight in front of them, 
thinking of nothing at all, and hoping that 
nobody would speak to them. So we fared; 
until, well on in the afternoon, we came to 
the entrance of Lake Ontario. 

There is something ominous and unnatural 
about these great lakes. The sweet flow of 
a river, and the unfriendly restless vitality 
of the sea, men may know and love. And 
the little lakes we have in Europe are but 
as fresh-water streams that have married 
and settled down, alive and healthy and 
comprehensible. Rivers (except the Saguenay) 
are human. The sea, very properly, will not 
be allowed in heaven. It has no soul. It is 
unvintageable, cruel, treacherous, what you 
will. But, in the end — while we have it with 
us — it is all right; even though that all- 
rightness result but, as with France, from the 
recognition of an age-long feud and an irre- 



78 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

mediable lack of sympathy. But these mon- 
strous lakes, which ape the ocean, are not 
proper to fresh water or salt. They have 
souls, perceptibly, and wicked ones. 

We steamed out, that day, over a flat, 
stationary mass of water, smooth with the 
smoothness of metal or polished stone or one's 
finger-nail. There was a slight haze every- 
where. The lake was a terrible dead-silver 
colour, the gleam of its surface shot with flecks 
of blue and a vapoury enamel-green. It was 
like a gigantic silver shield. Its glint was 
inexplicably sinister and dead, like the glint 
on glasses worn by a blind man. In front 
the steely mist hid the horizon, so that the 
occasional rock or little island and the one 
ship in sight seemed hung in air. They were 
reflected to a preternatural length in the 
glassy floor. Our boat appeared to leave no 
wake; those strange waters closed up foam- 
lessly behind her. But our black smoke hung, 
away back on the trail, in a thick, clearly- 
bounded cloud, becalmed in the hot, windless 
air, very close over the water, like an evil 
soul after death that cannot win dissolution. 
Behind us and to the right lay the low, woody 
shores of Southern Ontario and Prince Edward 
Peninsula, long dark lines of green, stretching 



ONTARIO 79 

thinner and thinner, interminably, into the 
distance. The lake around us was dull, 
though the sun shone full on it. It gleamed, 
but without radiance. 

Toronto (pronounce TWanto, please) is diflB- 
cult to describe. It has an individuahty, but 
an elusive one; yet not through any queer- 
ness or difficult shade of eccentricity; a subtly 
normal, an indefinably obvious personality. 
It is a healthy, cheerful city (by modern 
standards); a clean-shaven, pink-faced, re- 
spectably dressed, fairly energetic, unintel- 
lectual, passably sociable, well-to-do, public- 
school-and-'varsity sort of city. One knows 
in one's own life certain bright and pleasant 
figures; people who occupy the nearer middle 
distance, unobtrusive but not negligible; war- 
dens of the marches between acquaintance- 
ship and friendship. It is always nice to meet 
them, and in parting one looks back at them 
once. They are, healthily and simply, the 
most fitting product of a not perfect en- 
vironment; good-sorts; normal, but not too 
normal; distinctly themselves, but not dis- 
tinguished. They support civilisation. You 
can trust them in anything, if your demand 
be for nothing extremely intelligent or absurdly 
altruistic. One of these could be exhibited 



80 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

in any gallery in the universe, 'Perfect Speci- 
men; Upper Middle Classes; Twentieth 
Century' — and we should not be ashamed. 
They are not vexed by impossible dreams, 
nor outrageously materialists, nor perplexed 
by overmuch prosperity, nor spoilt by re- 
verse. Souls for whom the wind is always 
nor'-nor'-west, and they sail nearer success 
than failure, and nearer wisdom than lunacy. 
Neither leaders nor slaves — but no Tomlinsons ! 
— whomsoever of your friends you miss, them 
you will certainly meet again, not unduly 
pardoned, the fifty-first by the Throne. 

Such is Toronto. A brisk city of getting 
on for half a million inhabitants, the largest 
British city in Canada (in spite of the cheery 
Italian faces that pop up at you out of excava- 
tions in the street), liberally endowed with 
millionaires, not lacking its due share of destitu- 
tion, misery, and slums. It is no mushroom 
city of the West, it has its history; but at 
the same time it has grown immensely of recent 
years. It is situated on the shores of a lovely 
lake; but you never see that, because the 
railways have occupied the entire lake front. 
So if, at evening, you try to find your way to 
the edge of the water, you are checked by a 
region of smoke, sheds, trucks, wharves, store- 



ONTARIO 81 

houses, 'depots,' railway-lines, signals, and 
locomotives and trains that wander on the 
tracks up and down and across streets, pushing 
their way through the pedestrians, and tolling, 
as they go, in the American fashion, an im- 
mense melancholy bell, intent, apparently, 
on some private and incommunicable grief. 
Higher up are the business quarters, a few 
sky-scrapers in the American style without the 
modern American beauty, but one of which 
advertises itself as the highest in the British 
Empire; streets that seem less narrow than 
Montreal, but not unrespectably wide; "the 
buildings are generally substantial and often 
handsome" (the too kindly Herr Baedeker). 
Beyond that the residential part, with quiet 
streets, gardens open to the road, shady 
verandahs, and homes, generally of wood, 
that are a deal more pleasant to see than the 
houses in a modern English town. 

Toronto is the centre and heart of the Prov- 
ince of Ontario; and Ontario, with a third 
of the whole population of Canada, directs 
the country for the present, conditioned by 
the French on one hand and the West on the 
other. And in this land, that is as yet hardly 
at all conscious of itself as a nation, Toronto 
and Ontario do their best in leading and realis- 



82 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

ing national sentiment. A Toronto man, like 
most Canadians, dislikes an Englishman; but, 
unlike some Canadians, he detests an American. 
And he has some inkling of the conditions 
and responsibilities of the British Empire. 
The tradition is in him. His father fought 
to keep Canada British. 

It is never easy to pick out of the turmoil 
of an election the real powers that have moved 
men; and it is especially difficult in a country 
where politics are so corrupt as they are in 
Canada. But certainly this British feeling 
helped to throw Ontario, and so the country, 
against Reciprocity with the United States 
in 1911; and it is keeping it, in the comedy 
of the Navy Question, on Mr Borden's side — 
rather from distrust of his opponent's sincerity, 
perhaps, than from admiration of the fix he 
is in. It has been used, this patriotism, to 
aid the wealthy interests, which are all-power- 
ful here; and it will continue to be a ball in 
the tennis of party politics. But it is real; 
it will remain, potential of good, among all 
the forces that are certain for evil. 

Toronto, soul of Canada, is wealthy, busy, 
commercial, Scotch, absorbent of whisky; 
but she is duly aware of other things. She has 
a most modern and efficient interest in educa- 



ONTARIO 83 

tion; and here are gathered what faint, faint 
beginnings or premonitions of such things as 
Art Canada can boast (except the French- 
Canadians, who, it is complained, produce 
disproportionately much Hterature, and waste 
their time on their own unprofitable songs). 
Most of those few who have begun to paint 
the landscape of Canada centre there, and a 
handful of people who know about books. 
In these things, as in all, this city is properly 
and cheerfully to the front. It can scarcely 
be doubted that the first Repertory Theatre 
in Canada will be founded in Toronto, some 
thirty years hence, and will very daringly 
perform Candida and The Silver Box. Canada 
is a live country, live, but not, like the States, 
kicking. In these trifles of Art and 'culture,' 
indeed, she is much handicapped by the 
proximity of the States. For her poets and 
writers are apt to be drawn thither, for the 
better companionship there and the higher 
rates of pay. 

But Toronto — ^Toronto is the subject. One 
must say something — what must one say about 
Toronto.^ What can one.^^ What has any- 
body ever said.^ It is impossible to give it 
anything but commendation. It is not squalid 
like Birmingham, or cramped like Canton, 



84 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

or scattered like Edmonton, or sham like 
Berlin, or hellish like New York, or tiresome 
like Nice. It is all right. The only depressing 
thing is that it will always be what it is, only 
larger, and that no Canadian city can ever be 
anything better or different. If they are good 
they may become Toronto. 



VIII 
NIAGARA FALLS 



VIII 

NIAGARA FALLS 

Samuel Butler has a lot to answer for. But 
for him, a modern traveller could spend his 
time peacefully admiring the scenery instead 
of feeling himself bound to dog the simple 
and grotesque of the world for the sake of their 
too-human comments. It is his fault if a 
peasant's naivete has come to outweigh the 
beauty of rivers, and the remarks of clergymen 
are more than mountains. It is very restful 
to give up all effort at observing human nature 
and drawing social and political deductions 
from trifles, and to let oneself relapse into 
wide-mouthed worship of the wonders of 
nature. And this is very easy at Niagara. 
Niagara means nothing. It is not leading 
anywhere. It does not result from anything. 
It throws no light on the effects of Protection, 
nor on the Facility for Divorce in America, 
nor on Corruption in Public Life, nor on 
Canadian character, nor even on the Navy 
Bill. It is merely a great deal of water faUing 

87 



88 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

over some cliffs. But it is very remarkably 
that. The human race, apt as a child to 
destroy what it admires, has done its best 
to surround the Falls with every distraction, 
incongruity, and vulgarity. Hotels, power- 
houses, bridges, trams, picture post-cards, 
sham legends, stalls, booths, rifle-galleries, 
and side-shows frame them about. And 
there are Touts. Niagara is the central home 
and breeding-place for all the touts of earth. 
There are touts insinuating, and touts raucous, 
greasy touts, brazen touts, and upper-class, 
refined, gentlemanly, take - you - by - the - arm 
touts; touts who intimidate and touts who 
wheedle; professionals, amateurs, and dilet- 
tanti^ male and female; touts who would 
photograph you with your arm round a 
young lady against a faked background of 
the sublimest cataract, touts who would 
bully you into cars, char-a-bancs, elevators, or 
tunnels, or deceive you into a carriage and 
pair, touts who would sell you picture post- 
cards, moccasins, sham Indian beadwork, 
blankets, tee-pees, and crockery, and touts, 
finally, who have no apparent object in the 
world, but just purely, simply, merely, in- 
cessantly, indefatigably, and ineffugibly to 
tout. And in the midst of all this, over- 



NIAGARA FALLS 89 

whelming it all, are the Falls. He who sees 
them instantly forgets humanity. They are 
not very high, but they are overpowering. 
They are divided by an island into two parts, 
the Canadian and the American. 

Half a mile or so above the Falls, on 
either side, the water of the great stream 
begins to run more swiftly and in con- 
fusion. It descends with ever-growing speed. 
It begins chattering and leaping, breaking 
into a thousand ripples, throwing up joyful 
fingers of spray. Sometimes it is divided by 
islands and rocks, sometimes the eye can see 
nothing but a waste of laughing, springing, 
foamy waves, turning, crossing, even seem- 
ing to stand for an instant erect, but always 
borne impetuously forward like a crowd of 
triumphant f casters. Sit close down by it, 
and you see a fragment of the torrent against 
the sky, mottled, steely, and foaming, leaping 
onward in far-flung criss-cross strands of 
water. Perpetually the eye is on the point 
of descrying a pattern in this weaving, and 
perpetually it is cheated by change. In one 
place part of the flood plunges over a ledge 
a few feet high and a quarter of a mile or so 
long, in a uniform and stable curve. It 
gives an impression of almost military con- 



90 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

certed movement, grown suddenly out of 
confusion. But it is swiftly lost again in the 
multitudinous tossing merriment. Here and 
there a rock close to the surface is marked 
by a white wave that faces backwards and 
seems to be rushing madly up-stream, but 
is really stationary in the headlong charge. 
But for these signs of reluctance, the waters 
seem to fling themselves on with some fore- 
knowledge of their fate, in an ever wilder 
frenzy. But it is no Maeterlinckian pre- 
science. They prove, rather, that Greek 
belief that the great crashes are preceded 
by a louder merriment and a wilder gaiety. 
Leaping in the sunlight, careless, entv/ining, 
clamorously joyful, the waves riot on to- 
wards the verge. 

But there they change. As they turn to 
the sheer descent, the white and blue and 
slate colour, in the heart of the Canadian 
Falls at least, blend and deepen to a rich, 
wonderful, luminous green. On the edge 
of disaster the river seems to gather herself, 
to pause, to lift a head noble in ruin, and 
then, with a slow grandeur, to plunge into 
the eternal thunder and white chaos below. 
Where the stream runs shallower it is a kind 
of violet colour, but both violet and green 



NIAGARA FALLS 91 

fray and frill to white as they fall. The 
mass of water, striking some ever-hidden 
base of rock, leaps up the whole two hundred 
feet again in pinnacles and domes of spray. 
The spray falls back into the lower river 
once more; all but a little that fines to foam 
and white mist, which drifts in layers along 
the air, graining it, and wanders out on the 
wind over the trees and gardens and houses, 
and so vanishes. 

The manager of one of the great power- 
stations on the banks of the river above the 
Falls told me that the centre of the river- 
bed at the Canadian Falls is deep and of a 
saucer shape. So it may be possible to fill 
this up to a uniform depth, and divert a lot 
of water for the power-houses. And this, 
he said, would supply the need for more 
power, which will certainly soon arise, with- 
out taking away from the beauty of Niagara. 
This is a handsome concession of the utili- 
tarians to ordinary sight-seers. Yet, I doubt 
if we shall be satisfied. The real secret 
of the beauty and terror of the Falls is not 
their height or width, but the feeling of 
colossal power and of unintelligible disaster 
caused by the plunge of that vast body of 
water. If that were taken away, there would 



92 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

be little visible change, but the heart would 
be gone. 

The American Falls do not inspire this 
feeling in the same way as the Canadian. It 
is because they are less in volume, and be- 
cause the water does not fall so much into 
one place. By comparison their beauty is 
almost delicate and fragile. They are extra- 
ordinarily level, one long curtain of lacework 
and woven foam. Seen from opposite, when 
the sun is on them, they are blindingly white, 
and the clouds of spray show dark against 
them. With both Falls the colour of the 
water is the ever-altering wonder. Greens 
and blues, purples and whites, melt into one 
another, fade, and come again, and change 
with the changing sun. Sometimes they are 
as richly diaphanous as a precious stone, and 
glow from within with a deep, inexplicable 
light. Sometimes the white intricacies of 
dropping foam become opaque and creamy. 
And always there are the rainbows. If you 
come suddenly upon the Falls from above, 
a great double rainbow, very vivid, spanning 
the extent of spray from top to bottom, is 
the first thing you see. If you wander along 
the cliff opposite, a bow springs into being 
in the American Falls, accompanies you 



NIAGARA FALLS 93 

courteously on your walk, dwindles and dies 
as the mist ends, and awakens again as you 
reach the Canadian tumult. And the bold 
traveller who attempts the trip under the 
American Falls sees, when he dare open his 
eyes to anything, tiny baby rainbows, some 
four or five yards in span, leaping from rock 
to rock among the foam, and gambolling 
beside him, barely out of hand's reach, as he 
goes. One I saw in that place was a complete 
circle, such as I have never seen before, 
and so near that I could put my foot on it. 
It is a terrifying journey, beneath and behind 
the Falls. The senses are battered and be- 
wildered by the thunder of the water and the 
assault of wind and spray; or rather, the 
sound is not of falling water, but merely of 
falling; a noise of unspecified ruin. So, if 
you are close behind the endless clamour, the 
sight cannot recognise hquid in the masses 
that hurl past. You are dimly and pitifully 
aware that sheets of light and darkness are 
falling in great curves in front of you. Dull 
omnipresent foam washes the face. Farther 
away, in the roar and hissing, clouds of spray 
seem literally to slide down some invisible 
plane of air. 

Beyond the foot of the Falls the river is 



94 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

like a slipping floor of marble, green with 
veins of dirty white, made by the scum that 
was foam. It slides very quietly and slowly 
down for a mile or two, sullenly exhausted. 
Then it turns to a dull sage green, and hurries 
more swiftly, smooth and ominous. As the 
walls of the ravine close in, trouble stirs, and 
the waters boil and eddy. These are the 
lower rapids, a sight more terrifying than the 
Falls, because less intelligible. Close in its 
bands of rock the river surges tumultuously 
forward, writhing and leaping as if inspired 
by a demon. It is pressed by the straits 
into a visibly convex form. Great planes 
of water slide past. Sometimes it is thrown 
up into a pinnacle of foam higher than 
a house, or leaps with incredible speed 
from the crest of one vast wave to another, 
along the shining curve between, like the 
spring of a wild beast. Its motion continu- 
ally suggests muscular action. The power 
manifest in these rapids moves one with a 
different sense of awe and terror from that 
of the Falls. Here the inhuman life and 
strength are spontaneous, active, almost res- 
olute; masculine vigour compared with the 
passive gigantic power, female, helpless and 
overwhelming, of the Falls. A place of fear. 



NIAGARA FALLS 95 

One is drawn back, strangely, to a con- 
templation of the Falls, at every hour, and 
especially by night, when the cloud of spray 
becomes an immense visible ghost, straining 
and wavering high above the river, white 
and pathetic and translucent. The Victorian 
lies very close below the surface in every man. 
There one can sit and let great cloudy thoughts 
of destiny and the passage of empires drift 
through the mind; for such dreams are at 
home by Niagara. I could not get out of 
my mind the thought of a friend, who said 
that the rainbows over the Falls were like the 
arts and beauty and goodness, with regard 
to the stream of life — caused by it, thrown 
upon its spray, but unable to stay or direct 
or affect it, and ceasing when it ceased. In 
all comparisons that rise in the heart, the 
river, with its multitudinous waves and its 
single current, likens itself to a life, whether 
of an individual or of a community. A man's 
life is of many flashing moments, and yet 
one stream; a nation's flows through all its 
citizens, and yet is more than they. In such 
places, one is aware, with an almost insup- 
portable and yet comforting certitude, that 
both men and nations are hurried onwards 
to their ruin or ending as inevitably as this 



96 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

dark flood. Some go down to it unreluctant, 
and meet it, like the river, not without 
nobility. And as incessant, as inevitable, 
and as unavailing as the spray that hangs 
over the Falls, is the white cloud of human 
crying. . . . With some such thoughts does 
the platitudinous heart win from the con- 
fusion and thunder of a Niagara peace that 
the quietest plains or most stable hills can 
never give. 



IX 
TO WINNIPEG 



IX 

TO WINNIPEG 

The boats that run from Sarnia the whole 
length of Lake Huron and Lake Superior 
are not comfortable. But no doubt a train 
for those six hundred miles would be worse. 
You start one afternoon, and in the morning 
of the next day you have done with the 
rather colourless, unindividual expanses of 
Huron, and are dawdling along a canal that 
joins the lakes, by the little town of Sault 
Ste Marie (pronounced, abruptly, 'Soo'). 
We happened on it one Sunday. The nearer 
waters of the river and the lakes were covered 
with little sailing or rowing or bathing parties. 
Everybody seemed cheerful, merry, and 
mildly raucous. There is a fine, breezy, 
enviable healthiness about Canadian life. 
Except in some Eastern cities, there are few 
clerks or working-men but can get away to 
the woods and water. 

As we drew out into the cold magnificence 
of Lake Superior, the receding woody shores 



100 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

were occasionally spotted with picnickers or 
campers, who rushed down the beach in various 
deshabille, waving towels, handkerchiefs, or 
garments. We were as friendly. The human 
race seemed a jolly bunch, and the world a 
fine, pleasant, open-air affair — 'some world,' 
in fact. A man in a red shirt and a bronzed 
girl with flowing hair slid past in a canoe. We 
whistled, sang, and cried 'Snooky-ookums !' 
and other words of occult meaning, which 
imputed love to them, and foolishness. They 
replied suitably, grinned, and were gone. A 
little old lady in black, in the chair next mine, 
kept a small telescope glued to her eye, hour 
after hour. Whenever she distinguished life 
on any shore we passed, she waved a tiny 
handkerchief. Diligently she did this, and 
with grave face, never visible to the objects 
of her devotion, I suppose, but certainly very 
happy; the most persistent lover of humanity 
I have ever seen. . . . 

In the afternoon we were beyond sight of 
land. The world grew a little chilly; and 
over the opaque, hueless water came sliding 
a queer, pale mist. We strained through it 
for hours, a low bank of cloud, not twenty 
feet in height, on which one could look down 
from the higher deck. Its upper surface was 



TO WINNIPEG 101 

quite flat and smooth, save for innumerable 
tiny molehills or pyramids of mist. We seemed 
to be ploughing aimlessly through the phan- 
tasmal sand-dunes of another world, faintly 
and by an accident apprehended. So may 
the shades on a ghostly liner, plunging down 
Lethe, have an hour's chance glimpse of the 
lights and lives of Piccadilly, to them uncer- 
tain and filmy mirages of the air. 

To taste the full deliciousness of travelling 
in an American train by night through new 
scenery, you must carefully secure a lower 
berth. And when you are secret and separate 
in your little oblong world, safe between 
sheets, pull up the blinds on the great window 
a few inches and leave them so. Thus, as 
you lie, you can view the dark procession of 
woods and hills, and mingle the broken hours 
of railway slumber with gUmpses of a wild 
starHt landscape. The country retains in- 
dividuality, and yet puts on romance, especi- 
ally the rough, shaggy region between Port 
Arthur and Winnipeg. For four hundred 
miles there is hardly a sign that humanity 
exists on the earth's face, only rocks and 
endless woods of scrubby pine, and the occa- 
sional strange gleam of water, and night 
and the wind. Night-long, 4i*ea'i^ ^iid reality 



102 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

mingle. You may wake from sleep to find 
yourself flying through a region where a 
forest fire has passed, a place of grey pine- 
trunks, stripped of foliage, occasionally waving 
a naked bough. They appear stricken by 
calamity, intolerably bare and lonely, gaunt, 
perpetually protesting, amazed and tragic 
creatures. We saw no actual fire the night 
I passed. But a little while after dawn we 
noticed on the horizon, fifteen miles away, an 
immense column of smoke. There was little 
wind, and it hung, as if sculptured, against 
the grey of the morning; nor did we lose 
sight of it till just before we boomed over a 
wide, swift, muddy river, into the flat city of 
Winnipeg. 

Winnipeg is the West. It is important 
and obvious that in Canada there are two or 
three (some say five) distinct Canadas. Even 
if you lump the French and English together 
as one community in the East, there remains 
the gulf of the Great Lakes. The difference 
between East and West is possibly no greater 
than that between North and South England, 
or Bavaria and Prussia; but in this country, 
yet unconscious of itself, there is so much less 
to hold them together. The character of the 
land and the people differs; their interests. 



TO WINNIPEG 103 

as it appears to them, are not the same. 
Winnipeg is a new city. In the archives at 
Ottawa is a picture of Winnipeg in 1870 — 
Mainstreet, with a few shacks, and the prairie 
either end. Now her population is a hundred 
thousand, and she has the biggest this, that, 
and the other west of Toronto. A new city; a 
Httle more American than the other Canadian 
cities, but not unpleasantly so. The streets 
are wider, and full of a bustle which keeps 
clear of hustle. The people have something 
of the free swing of Americans, without the 
bumptiousness; a tempered democracy, a 
mitigated independence of bearing. The 
manners of Winnipeg, of the West, impress 
the stranger as better than those of the East, 
more friendly, more hearty, more certain to 
achieve graciousness, if not grace. There is, 
even, in the architecture of Winnipeg, a sort 
of gauche pride visible. It is hideous, of 
course, even more hideous than Toronto or 
Montreal; but cheerily and windily so. There 
is no scheme in the city, and no beauty, but 
it is at least preferable to Birmingham, less 
dingy, less directly depressing. It has no 
real slums, even though there is poverty and 
destitution. 
But there seems to be a trifle more public 



104 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

spirit in the West than the East. Perhaps it 
is that in the greater eagerness and confidence 
of this newer country men have a superfluity 
of energy and interest, even after attending 
to their own affairs, to give to the community. 
Perhaps it is that the West is so young that 
one has a suspicion money-making has still 
some element of a child's game in it — its only 
excuse. At any rate, whether because the 
state of affairs is yet unsettled, or because of 
the invisible subtle spirit of optimism that 
blows through the heavily clustering telephone- 
wires and past the neat little modern villas 
and down the solidly pretentious streets, one 
can't help finding a tiny hope that Winnipeg, 
the city of buildings and the city of human 
beings, may yet come to something. It is a 
slender hope, not to be compared to that of 
the true Winnipeg man, who, gazing on his 
city, is fired with the proud and secret ambition 
that it will soon be twice as big, and after that 
four times, and then ten times . . . 

"Wider still and wider 

Shall thy bounds be set," 

says that hymn which is the noblest expression 
of modern ambition. That hope is sure to be 
fulfilled. But the other timid prayer, that 
something different, something more worth 



TO WINNIPEG 105 

having, may come out of Winnipeg, exists, 
and not quite unreasonably. That cannot 
be said of Toronto. 

Winnipeg is of the West, new, vigorous in 
its way, of unknown potentiaHties. Already 
the West has been a nuisance to the East, in 
the fight of 1911 over Reciprocity with the 
United States. When she gets a larger re- 
presentation in Parliament, she will be still 
more of a nuisance. A casual traveller 
cannot venture to investigate the beliefs and 
opinions of the inhabitants of a country, but 
he can record them all the better, perhaps, 
for his foreign-ness. It is generally believed 
in the West that the East runs Canada, and 
runs it for its own advantage. And the East 
means a very few rich men; who control the 
big railways, the banks, and the Manufacturers' 
Association, subscribe to both political parties, 
and are generally credited with complete 
control over the TariflE and most other Canadian 
affairs. Whether or no the Manufacturers' 
Association does arrange the Tariff and control 
the commerce of Canada, it is generally believed 
to do so. The only thing is that its friends 
say that it acts in the best interests of Canada, 
its enemies that it acts in the best interests of 
the Manufacturers' Association. Among its 



106 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

enemies are many in the West. The normal 
Western hfe is a lonely and individual one; 
and a large part of the population has crossed 
from the United States, or belongs to that 
great mass of European immigration that 
Canada is letting so blindly in. So, naturally, 
the W^esterner does not feel the same aflfection 
for the Empire or for England as the British 
Canadians of the East, whose forefathers 
fought to stay within the Empire. Nor is his 
afifection increased by the suspicion that the 
Imperial cry has been used for party purposes. 
He has no use for politics at Ottawa. The 
naval question is nothing to him. He wants 
neither to subscribe money nor to build ships. 
Europe is very far away; and he is too ignorant 
to realise his close connection with her. He 
has strong views, however, on a Tariff which 
only affects him by perpetually raising the 
cost of living and farming. The ideas of even 
a Conservative in the West about reducing 
the Tariff would make an Eastern 'Liberal' 
die of heart-failure. And the Westerner also 
hates the Banks. The banking system of 
Canada is peculiar, and throws the control 
of the banks into the hands of a few people 
in the East, who were felt, by the ever 
optimistic West, to have shut down credit 



TO WINNIPEG 107 

too completely during the recent money 
stringency. 

The most interesting expression of the new 
Western point of view, and in many ways the 
most hopeful movement in Canada, is the 
Co-operative movement among the grain- 
growers of the three prairie provinces. Only 
started a few years ago, it has grown rapidly 
in numbers, wealth, power, and extent of 
operations. So far it has confined itself 
politically to influencing provincial legislatures. 
But it has gradually attached itself to an 
advanced Radical programme of a Chartist 
description. And it is becoming powerful. 
Whether the outcome will be a very desirable 
rejuvenation of the Liberal Party, or the 
creation of a third — perhaps Radical Labour 
party, it is hard to tell. At any rate, the 
change will come. And, just to start with, 
there will very shortly come to the Eastern 
Powers, who threw out Reciprocity with the 
States for the sake of the Empire, a demand 
from the West that the preference to British 
goods be increased rapidly till they be allowed 
to come in free, also for the Empire's sake. 
Then the fun will begin. 



X 

OUTSIDE 



OUTSIDE 

I HAD visited New York, Boston, Quebec, 
Montreal, and Toronto. In Winnipeg I 
found a friend, who was tired of cities. So 
was I. In Canada the remedy lies close at 
hand. We took ancient clothes — and I, Ben 
Jonson and Jane Austen to keep me English 
— and departed northward for a lodge, re- 
ported to exist in a region of lakes and hills 
and forests and caribou and Indians and a few 
people. At first the train sauntered through 
a smiling plain, intermittently cultivated, and 
dotted with little new villages. Over this 
country are thrown little pools of that flood 
of European immigration that pours through 
Winnipeg, to remain separate or be absorbed, 
as destiny wills. The problem of immigration 
here reveals that purposelessness that exists 
in the affairs of Canada even more than those 
of other nations. The multitude from South 
or East Europe flocks in. Some make money 
and return. The most remain, often in in- 

111 



112 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

assimilable lumps. There is every sign that 
these lumps may poison the health of Canada 
as dangerously as they have that of the 
United States. For Canada there is the peril 
of too large an element of foreign blood and 
traditions in a small nation already little more 
than half composed of British blood and 
descent. Nationalities seem to teach one 
another only their worst. If the Italians gave 
the Canadians of their good manners, and the 
Doukhobors or Poles inoculated them with 
idealism and the love of beauty, and received 
from them British romanticism and sense of 
responsibility! .... But they only seem to 
increase the anarchy, these 'foreigners,' and 
to learn the American twang and method of 
spitting. And there is the peril of politics. 
Upon these scattered exotic communities, 
ignorant of the problems of their adopted 
land, ignorant even of its language, swoop 
the agents of political parties, with their 
one effectual argument — ^bad whisky. This 
baptism is the immigrants' only organised 
welcome into their new liberties. Occasion- 
ally some Church raises a thin protest. But 
the 'Anglo-Saxon' continues to take up his 
burden; and the floods from Europe pour in. 
Canadians regard this influx with that queer 



OUTSIDE 113 

fatalism which men adopt under plutocracy. 
"How could they stop it? It pays the 
steamship and railway companies. It may, 
or may not, be good for Canada. Who knows "^ 
In any case, it will go on. Our masters wish 
it. . . ." 

It is noteworthy that Icelanders are found 
to be far the readiest to mingle and be- 
come Canadian. After them, Norwegians and 
Swedes. With other immigrant nationalities, 
hope lies with the younger generation; but 
these acclimatise immediately. 

Our train was boarded by a crowd of 
Ruthenians or Galicians, brown-eyed and 
beautiful people, not yet wholly civilised out 
of their own costume. The girls chatted to- 
gether in a swift, lovely language, and the 
children danced about, tossing their queer 
brown mops of hair. They clattered out at 
a little village that seemed to belong to them, 
and stood waving and laughing us out of sight. 
I pondered on their feelings, and looked for 
the name of the little Utopia these aliens had 
found in a new world. It was called (for the 
railway companies name towns in this country) 
'Milner.' 

We wandered into rougher country, where 
the rocks begin to show through the surface. 



114 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

and scrub pine abounds. At the end of our 
side-line was another, and at the end of that 
a village, the ultimate outpost of civilisation. 
Here, on the way back, some weeks later, 
we had to spend the night in a little hotel 
which 'accommodated transients.' It was a 
rough affair of planks, inhabited by whatever 
wandering workman from construction-camps 
or other labour in the region wanted shelter 
for the night. You slept in a sort of dormitory, 
each bed partitioned off from the rest by walls 
that were some feet short of the ceiling. 
Swedes, Germans, Welsh, Italians, and Poles 
occupied the other partitions, each blasphem- 
ing the works of the Lord in his own tongue. 
About midnight two pairs of feet crashed into 
the cell opposite mine; and a high, sleepless 
voice, with an accent I knew, continued an 
interminable argument on theology. "I' 
beginning wash word," it proclaimed with all 
the melancholy of drunkenness. The other 
disputant was German or Norwegian, and un- 
interested, though very kindly. "Right-o!" 
he said. "Let's go sleep !" 

^'What word.^" pondered the Englishman. 
The Norwegian suggested several, sleepily. 
"Logos," wailed the other, ''What Logos .^" 
and wept. They persisted, hour by hour. 



OUTSIDE 115 

disconnected voices in the void and darkness, 
lonely and chance companions in the back- 
blocks of Canada, the one who couldn't, and 
the one who didn't want to, understand. A 
little before dawn I woke again. That thin 
voice, in patient soliloquy, was discussing 
Female Suffrage, going very far down into the 
roots of the matter. I met its owner next 
morning. He was tall and dark and lachry- 
mose, with bloodshot eyes, and breath that 
stank of gin. He had played scrum-half for 

College in '98; and had prepared for 

ordination. "You'll understand, old man," 
he said, "how out of place I am amongst this 
scum — OL TToXXoL — we're not of the ol ttoXXo/, are 
we.^" It seemed nicer to agree. "Oh, I 
know Greek !" — he was too eagerly the gentle- 
man — "o KoajJLOS Trjs ahdas — the last thing I 
learnt for ordination — this world of injustice 
— that's right, isn't it.^" He laughed sickly. 
"I say as one 'Varsity man to another — we're 
not 01 ToWoL — could you lend me some 
money .^" 

We had to press on thirty miles up a * light 
railway' to a power-station, a settlement by 
a waterfall in the wild. An engine and an 
ancient luggage- van conveyed us. The van 
held us, three crates, and some sacks, four 



116 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

half-breeds in black slouch hats, who curled 
up on the floor like dogs and slept, and an 
aged Italian. This last knew no word of 
English. He had travelled all the way from 
Naples, Heaven knows how, to find his two 
sons, supposed to be working in the power- 
station. So much was written on a piece of 
paper. We gave him chocolate, and at in- 
tervals I repeated to him my only Italian, 
the first line of the Divina Commedia. He 
seemed cheered. The van jolted on through 
the fading light. Once a man stepped out 
on to the track, stopped us, and clambered 
silently up. We went on. It was the doctor, 
who had been visiting some lonely hut in 
the woods. Later, another figure v/as seen 
staggering between the rails. We slowed up, 
shouted, and finally stopped, butting him 
gently on the back with our buffers, and 
causing him to fall. He was very drunk. 
The driver and the doctor helped him into 
the van. There he stood, and looking round, 
said very distinctly, "I do not wish to travel 

on your train." So we put him off 

again, and proceeded. Such is the West. 

We rattled interminably through the dark- 
ness. The unpeopled woods closed about us, 
snatched with lean branches, and opened out 



OUTSIDE 117 

again to a windy space. Once or twice the 
ground fell away, and there was, for a moment, 
the mysterious gleam and stir of water. 
Canadian stars are remote and virginal. 
Everyone slumbered. Arrival at the great 
concrete building and the little shacks of the 
power-station shook us to our feet. The 
Italian vanished into the darkness. Whether 
he found his sons or fell into the river no one 
knew, and no one seemed to care. 

An Indian, taciturn and Mongolian, led us 
on next day, by boat and on foot, to the 
lonely log-house we aimed at. It stood on 
high rocks, above a lake six miles by two. 
There was an Indian somewhere, by a river 
three miles west, and a trapper to the east, 
and a family encamped on an island in the 
lake. Else nobody. 

It is that feeling of fresh loneliness that 
impresses itself before any detail of the wild. 
The soul — or the personality — seems to have 
indefinite room to expand. There is no one 
else within reach, there never has been any- 
one; no one else is thinking of the lakes 
and hills you see before you. They have no 
tradition, no names even; they are only pools 
of water and lumps of earth, some day, per- 
haps to be clothed with loves and memories 



118 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

and the comings and goings of men, but now 
dumbly waiting their Wordsworth or their 
AcropoHs to give them individuality, and a 
soul. In such country as this there is rarefied 
clean sweetness. The air is unbreathed, and 
the earth untrodden. All things share this 
childHke loveliness, the grey whispering reeds, 
the pure blue of the sky, the birches and thin 
fir-trees that make up these forests, even the 
brisk touch of the clear water as you dive. 

That last sensation, indeed, and none of 
sight or hearing, has impressed itself as the 
token of Canada, the land. Every swimmer 
knows it. It is not languorous, like bathing 
in a warm Southern sea; nor grateful, like a 
river in a hot climate; nor strange, as the 
ocean always is; nor startling, like very cold 
water. But it touches the body continually 
with freshness, and it seems to be charged 
with a subtle and unexhausted energy. It 
is colourless, faintly stinging, hard and grey, 
like the rocks around, full of vitality, and 
sweet. It has the tint and sensation of a pale 
dawn before the sun is up. Such is the wild of 
Canada. It awaits the sun, the end for which 
Heaven made it, the blessing of civilisation. 
Some day it will be sold in large portions, 
and the timber given to a friend of 's. 



OUTSIDE 119 

and cut down and made into paper, on which 
shall be printed the praise of prosperity; and 
the land itself shall be divided into town-lots 
and sold, and sub-divided and sold again, 
and boomed and resold, and boosted and 
distributed to fishy young men who will vend 
it in distant parts of the country; and then 
such portions as can never be built upon shall 
be given in exchange for great sums of money 
to old ladies in the quieter parts of England, 
but the central parts of towns shall remain in 
the hands of the wise. And on these shall 
churches, hotels, and a great many ugly sky- 
scrapers be built, and hovels for the poor, and 
houses for the rich, none beautiful, and there 
shall ugly objects be manufactured, rather 
hurriedly, and sold to the people at more than 
they are worth, because similar and cheaper 
objects made in other countries are kept out 
by a tariff. . . . 

But at present there are only the wrinkled, 
grey-blue lake, sliding ever sideways, and the 
grey rocks, and the cliffs and hills, covered 
with birch-trees, and the fresh wind among the 
birches, and quiet, and that unseizable virginity. 
Dawn is always a lost pearly glow in the ashen 
skies, and sunset a multitude of softly-tinted 
mists sliding before a remotely golden West. 



120 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

They follow one another with an infinite 
loneliness. And there is a far and soHtary 
beach of dark, golden sand, close by a deserted 
Indian camp, where, if you drift quietly 
round the corner in a canoe, you may see a 
bear stumbling along, or a great caribou, or a 
little red deer coming down to the water to 
drink, treading the wild edge of lake and 
forest with a light, secret, and melancholy 
grace. 



XI 
THE PRAIRIES 



XI 

THE PRAIRIES 

I PASSED the last few hours of the west- 
ward journey from Winnipeg to Regina in 
dayhght, the dayhght of a wet and cheerless 
Sunday. The car was half-empty, in pos- 
session of a family of small children and some 
theatrical ladies and gentlemen from the United 
States, travelling on 'one night stands,' who 
were collectively called 'The World-Renowned 
Barbary Pirates.' We jogged limply from 
little village to little village, each composed of 
little brown log-shacks, with a few buildings 
of tin and corrugated iron, and even of brick, 
and several grain-elevators. Each village — 
I beg your pardon, 'town' — seems to be 
exactly like the next. They differ a little in 
size, from populations of 100 to nearly 2000, 
and in age, for some have buildings dating 
almost back to the nineteenth century, and a 
few are still mostly tents. They seemed all to 
be emptied of their folk this Sabbath morn; 
though whether the inhabitants were at work, 

123 



124 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

or in church, or had shot themselves from 
depression induced by the weather, it was 
impossible to tell. These little towns do not 
look to the passer-by comfortable as homes. 
Partly, there is the difficulty of distinguishing 
your village from the others. It would be as 
bad as being married to a Jap. And then 
towns should be on hills or in valleys, however 
small. A town dumped down, apparently by 
chance, on a flat expanse wears the same air 
of discomfort as a man trying to make his 
bed on a level, unyielding surface such as a 
lawn or pavement. He feels hopelessly inci- 
dental to the superficies of the earth. He is 
aware that the human race has thigh-bones. . . . 
Yet this country is not quite flat, as I had 
been led to expect. It does not give you that 
feeling of a plain you have in parts of Lom- 
bardy and Holland and Belgium. This may 
have been due to the grey mist and drizzle 
which curtained off the horizon. But the 
land was always very slightly roUing, and 
sometimes almost as uneven as a Surrey 
common. At first it seemed to be given to 
mixed farming a good deal; afterwards to 
wheat, oats, and barley. But a great part is 
uncultivated prairie-land, grass, with sparse 
bushes and patches of brushwood and a few 



THE PRAIRIES 125 

rare trees, and continual clumps of large 
golden daisies. Occasional rough black roads 
wind through the brush and into the towns, 
and die into grass tracks along the wire fences. 
The day I went through, the interminable, 
oblique, thin rain took the gold out of the 
wheat and the brown from the distant fields 
and bushes, and drabbed all the colours 
in the grass. The children in the car cried 
to each other with the shrill, sick persist- 
ency of tired childhood, "How many inches 
to Regina?" "A Billion." "A Trillion." 
"A Shillion." The Barbary Pirates laughed 
incessantly. It seemed to me that the 
prairie would be a lonely place to live in, 
especially if it rained. But the people who 
have lived there for years tell me they get 
very homesick if they go away for a time. 
Valleys and hills seem to them petty, fretful, 
unlovable. The magic of the plains has them 
in thrall. 

Certainly there is a little more democracy 
in the west of Canada than the east; the 
communities seem a little less incapable of 
looking after themselves. Out in the west 
they are erecting not despicable public build- 
ings, founding universities, running a few 
public services. That ^politics' has a voice 



U6 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

in these undertakings does not make them 
valueless. There are perceptible in the 
prairies, among all the corruption, irresponsi- 
bility, and disastrous individuahsm, some faint 
signs of the sense of the community. Take a 
very good test, the public libraries. As you 
traverse Canada from east to west they 
steadily improve. You begin in the city of 
Montreal, which is unable to support one, and 
pass through the dingy rooms and inadequate 
intellectual provision of Toronto and Winnipeg. 
After that the libraries and reading-rooms, 
small for the smaller cities, are cleaner and 
better kept, show signs of care and intelligence; 
until at last, in Calgary, you find a very neat 
and carefully kept building, stocked with an 
immense variety of periodicals, and an admi- 
rably chosen store of books, ranging from the 
classics to the most utterly modern literature. 
Few large English towns could show anything 
as good. Cross the Rockies to Vancouver, 
and you're back among dirty walls, grubby 
furniture, and inadequate literature again. 
There's nothing in Canada to compare with 
the magnificent libraries little New Zealand 
can show. But Calgary is hopeful. 

These cities grow in population with un- 
imaginable velocity. From thirty to thirty 



THE PRAIRIES 127 

thousand in fifteen years is the usual rate. 
Pavements are laid down, stores and bigger 
stores and still bigger stores spring up. Trams 
buzz along the streets towards the unregarded 
horizon that lies across the end of most roads 
in these flat, geometrically planned, prairie- 
towns. Probably a Chinese quarter appears, 
and the beginnings of slums. Expensive and 
pleasant small dwelling-houses fringe the out- 
skirts; and rents being so high, great edifices 
of residential fiats rival the great stores. In 
other streets, or even sandwiched between the 
finer buildings, are dingy and decaying saloons, 
and innumerable little booths and hovels 
where adventurers deal dishonestly in Real 
Estate, and Employment Bureaux. And there 
are the vast erections of the great corporations, 
Hudson's Bay Company, and the banks and 
the railways, and, sometimes almost equally 
impressive, the public buildings. There are 
the beginnings of very costly universities; 
and Regina has built a superb great House 
of Parhament, with a wide sheet of water in 
frant of it, a noble building. 

The inhabitants of these cities are proud 
of them, and envious of each other with a 
bitter rivalry. They do not love their cities 
as a Manchester man loves Manchester or a 



128 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

Miinchener Munich, for they have probably 
lately arrived in them, and will surely pass on 
soon. But while they are there they love them, 
and with no silent love. They boost. To boost 
is to commend outrageously. And each cries 
up his own city, both from pride, it would 
appear, and for profit. For the fortunes of 
Newville are very really the fortunes of its 
inhabitants. From the successful speculator, 
owner of whole blocks, to the waiter bringing 
you a Martini, who has paid up a fraction of 
the cost of a quarter-share in a town-lot — 
all are the richer, as well as the prouder, if 
Newville grows. It is imperative to praise 
Edmonton in Edmonton. But it is sudden 
death to praise it in Calgary. The partisans 
of each city proclaim its superiority to all 
the others in swiftness of growth, future 
population, size of buildings, price of land — 
by all recognised standards of excellence. I 
travelled from Edmonton to Calgary in the 
company of a citizen of Edmonton and a 
citizen of Calgary. Hour after hour they 
disputed. Land in Calgary had risen from 
five dollars to three hundred; but in 
Edmonton from three to five hundred. 
Edmonton had grown from thirty persons to 
forty thousand in twenty years; but Calgary 



THE PRAIRIES 129 

from twenty to thirty thousand in twelve. . . . 
"Where" — as a respite — "did I come from?" 
I had to tell them, not without shame, that 
my own town of Grantchester, having num- 
bered three hundred at the time of Julius 
Caesar's landing, had risen rapidly to nearly 
four by Doomsday Book, but was now declined 
to three-fifty. They seemed perplexed and 
angry. 

Sentimental people in the East will talk of 
the romance of the West, and of these simple, 
brave pioneers who have wrung a living from 
the soil, and are properly proud of the rude 
little towns that mark their conquest over 
nature. That may apply to the frontiers of 
civilisation up North, but the prairie-towns 
have progressed beyond all that. A few of 
the old pioneers of the West survive to watch 
with startled eyes the wonderful fruits of 
the seed they sowed. Such are among the 
finest people in Canada, very different from 
the younger generation, with wider interests, 
good talkers, the best of company. From 
them, and from records, one can learn of the 
early settlers and the beginnings of the North- 
West Mounted Police. The police seem to 
have been superb. For no great reward, but 
the love of the thing, they imposed order and 



130 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

fairness upon half a continent. The Indians 
trusted them utterly; they were without fear. 
A store stands now in Calgary where forty 
years ago a policeman was shot to death by a 
murderer, followed over a thousand miles. 
He knew that the criminal would shoot; but 
it was the rule of the Mounted Police not to 
fire first. Wounded, he killed his man, then 
died. And there was the case of the desperado 
who crossed the border, and was eventually 
captured and held by an immense force of 
American police and military. They awaited 
a regiment of the Police to conduct the villain 
back to trial. Two appeared, and being asked, 
"Where is the escort?" replied, ''W^e are the 
escort," and started back their five hundred 
miles ride with the murderer in tow. And 
there were the two who pursued a horse-thief 
from Dawson down to Minneapolis, caught him, 
and took him back to Dawson to be hanged. 
And there was the settler, who . . . 

The tragedy of the West is that these men 
have passed, and that what they lived and 
died to secure for their race is now the founda- 
tion for a gigantic national gambling of a 
most unprofitable and disastrous kind. Hordes 
of people — who mostly seem to come from the 
great neighbouring Commonwealth, and are 



THE PRAIRIES 131 

inspired with the national hunger for getting 
rich quickly without deserving it — prey on 
the community by their dealings in what is 
humorously called 'Real Estate.' For them 
our fathers died. What a sowing, and what a 
harvest! And where good men worked or 
perished is now a row of little shops, all 
devoted to the sale of town-lots in some distant 
spot that must infallibly become a great city 
in the next two years, and in the doorway of 
each lounges a thin-chested, much-spitting 
youth, with a flabby face, shifty eyes, and an 
inhuman mouth, who invites you continually, 
with the most raucous of American accents, 
to "step inside and examine our Praposition." 



xn 

THE INDIANS 



XII 

THE INDIANS 

When I was in the East, I got to know a man 
who had spent many years of his life living 
among the Indians. He showed me his photo- 
graphs. He explained one, of an old woman. 
He said, "They told me there was an old 
woman in the camp called Laughing Earth. 
When I heard the name, I just said, 'Take me 
to her ! ' She wouldn't be photographed. 
She kept turning her back to me. I just 
picked up a clod and plugged it at her, and 
said, 'Turn round. Laughing Earth!' She 
turned half round, and grinned. She was a 
game old bird ! I joshed all the boys here 
Laughing Earth was my girl — till they saw 
her photo !" 

There stands Laughing Earth, in brightly- 
coloured petticoat and blouse, her grey hair 
blowing about her. Her back is towards you, 
but her face is turned, and scarcely hidden 
by a hand that is raised with all the coyness 
of seventy years. Laughter shines from the 

135 



136 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

infinitely lined, round, brown cheeks, and 
from the mouth, and from the dancing eyes, 
and floods and spills over from each of 
the innumerable wrinkles. Laughing Earth — 
there is endless vitality in that laughter. The 
hand and face and the old body laugh. No 
skinny, intellectual mirth, aflfecting but the 
lips! It was the merriment of an apple 
bobbing on the bough, or a brown stream 
running over rocks, or any other gay creature 
of earth. And with all was a great dignity, 
invulnerable to clods, and a kindly and noble 
beauty. By the light of that laughter much 
becomes clear — the right place of man upon 
earth, the entire suitability in life of very 
brightly-coloured petticoats, and the fact that 
old age is only a different kind of a merriment 
from youth, and a wiser. 

And by that light the fragments of this 
pathetic race become more comprehensible, 
and, perhaps, less pathetic. The wanderer 
in Canada sees them from time to time, the 
more the further west he goes, irrelevant and 
inscrutable figures. In the east, French and 
Scotch half-breeds frequent the borders of 
civilisation. In any western town you may 
chance on a brave and his wife and a ba-by, 
resplendent in gay blankets and trappings. 



THE INDIANS 137 

sliding gravely through the hideousness of the 
new order that has supplanted them. And 
there will be a few half-breeds loitering at 
the corners of the streets. These people of 
mixed race generally seem unfortunate in the 
first generation. A few of the older ones, 
the 'old-timers/ have 'made good/ and 
hold positions in the society for which they 
pioneered. But most appear to inherit 
the weaknesses of both sides. Drink does its 
work. And the nobler ones, like the tragic 
figure of that poetess who died recently, 
Pauline Johnson, seem fated to be at odds 
with the world. The happiest, whether Indian 
or half-breed, are those who live beyond the 
ever-advancing edges of cultivation and order, 
and force a livelihood from nature by hunting 
and fishing. Go anywhere into the wild, and 
you will find in little clearings, by lake or 
river, a dilapidated hut with a family of these 
solitaries, friendly with the pioneers or trappers 
around, ready to act as guide on hunt or trail. 
The Government, extraordinarily painstaking 
and well-intentioned, has established Indian 
schools, and trains some of them to take 
their places in the civilisation we have built. 
Not the best Indians these, say lovers of 
the race. I have met them, as clerks or 



138 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

stenographers, only distinguishable from their 
neighbours by a darker skin and a sweeter 
voice and manner. And in a generation or 
two, I suppose, the strain mingles and is lost. 
So we finish with kindness what our fathers 
began with war. 

The Government, and others, have scien- 
tifically studied the history and characteristics 
of the Indians, and written them down in 
books, lest it be forgotten that human beings 
could be so extraordinary. They were a 
wandering race, it appears, of many tribes 
and, even, languages. Not apt to arts or 
crafts, they had, and have, an unrefined 
delight in bright colours. They enjoyed a 
^Nature- Worship,' believed rather dimly in 
a presiding Power, and very definitely in 
certain ethical and moral rules. One of their 
incomprehensible customs was that at certain 
intervals the tribe divided itseM into two 
factitious divisions, each headed by various 
chiefs, and gambled furiously for many days, 
one party against the other. They were 
pugnacious, and in their uncivilised way 
fought frequent wars. They were remark- 
ably loyal to each other, and treacherous to 
the foe; brave, and very stoical. "Monog- 
amy was very prevalent." It is remarked 



THE INDIANS 139 

that husbands and wives were very fond of 
each other, and the great body of scientific 
opinion favours the theory that mothers were 
much attached to their children. Most tribes 
were very healthy, and some fine-looking. 
Such were the remarkable people who hunted, 
fought, feasted, and lived here until the light 
came, and all was changed. Other qualities 
they had even more remarkable to a European, 
such as utter honesty, and complete devo- 
tion to the truth among themselves. Civil- 
isation, disease, alcohol, and vice have reduced 
them to a few scattered communities and 
some stragglers, and a legend, the admiration 
of boyhood. Boys they were, pugnacious, 
hunters, loyal, and cruel, older than the 
merrier children of the South Seas, younger 
and simpler than the weedy, furtive, acquisitive 
youth who may figure our age and type. "We 
must be a Morally Higher race than the 
Indians," said an earnest American business- 
man to me in Saskatoon, "because we have 
Survived them. The Great Darwin has 
proved it." I visited, later, a community 
of our Moral Inferiors, an Indian 'reserva- 
tion' under the shade of the Rockies. The 
Government has put aside various tracts 
of land where the Indians may conduct 



140 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

their lives in something of their old way, 
and stationed in each an agent to protect 
their interests. For every white man, as 
an agent told me, "thinks an Indian legiti- 
mate prey for all forms of cheating and 
robbery." 

The reservations are the better in proportion 
as they are further from the towns and cities. 
The one I saw was peopled by a few hundred 
Stonies, one of the finest and most untouched 
of the tribes. Of these Laughing Earth had 
made one, but alas ! a few years before she 
had become 

"a portion of the mlrthfulness 
That once she made more mirthful." 

The Indians occupy themselves with a 
little farming and hunting, and with expedi- 
tions, and Uve in two or three small scattered 
villages of huts and tents. But the centre of 
the community is the little white-washed house 
where the agent has his office. Here we sat, 
he and I, and talked, behind the counter. 
The agent is father, mother, clergyman, tutor, 
physician, solicitor, and banker to the Indians. 
They wandered in and out of the place with 
their various requests. The most part of 
them could not talk English, but there was 



THE INDIANS 141 

generally some young Indian to interpret. 
An old chief entered. His grey hair curled 
down to his broad shoulders. He had a 
noble forehead, brown, steady eyes, a thin, 
humorous mouth. His cow had been run 
over by the C.P.R. What was to be done.^^ 
and how much would he get.^ The affair 
was discussed through an interpreter, a 
Canadianised young Indian in trousers, who 
spat. Some of the men, especially the older 
ones, have wonderful dignity and beauty of 
face and body. Their physique is superb; 
their features shaped and lined by weather 
and experience into a Roman nobility that 
demands respect. Several such passed through. 
Then came an old woman, wizened and 
loquacious, bent double by the sack of her 
weekly provision of meat and flour. She 
required oil, was given it, secreted it in some 
cranny of the many-coloured bundle that 
she was, and staggered creakily off again. 

The office emptied for a while. Then 
drifted in a younger man, tall, with that 
brown, dog-like expression of simpUcity many 
Indians wear. He was covered by a large 
grey-coloured blanket, over his other clothes. 
He puffed at a pipe and stared out of the 
window. The agent and I continued talking. 



142 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

You must never hurry an Indian. Presently 
he gave a httle grunt. The agent said, 
" Well, John ? " John went on smoking. Five 
minutes later, in the middle of our conversa- 
tion, John said suddenly, "Salt." He was 
staring inexpressively at the ceiling. "Why, 
John," said the agent, "I gave you enough 
salts on Thursday to last you a week." John 
directed his gaze on us, and smoked dumbly. 
"Still the stomach.^" inquired the agent, 
genially. John's expression became gradu- 
ally grimmer, and he moved one hand slowly 
across till it rested on his stomach. An 
impassive, significant hand. After a courteous 
pause the agent rose, poured some Epsom 
salts out of a large jar, wrapped them in paper, 
and handed them over. John secreted them 
dispassionately in some pouch among the 
skins and blankets that wrapped him in. We 
went back to our conversation. Five min- 
utes after he grunted, suddenly. Again 
five minutes, and he departed. His wife — a 
plump, patient young woman — and his solemn- 
eyed, fat, ridiculous son of four, were sitting 
stolidly on the grass outside. It obviously 
made no difference if he took one hour or 
seven over his business. They mounted their 
tiny ponies and trotted briskly off. ... 



THE INDIANS 143 

I suppose one is apt to be sentimental 
about these good people. They're really so 
picturesque; they trail clouds of Fenimore 
Cooper; and they seem, for all their unfitness, 
reposefuUy more in touch with permanent 
things than the America that has succeeded 
them. And it is interesting to watch our 
pathetic efforts to prevent or disarm the 
effects of ourselves. What will happen.^ 
Shall we preserve these few bands of them, 
untouched, to succeed us, ultimately, when 
the grasp of our 'civilisation' weakens, and 
our transient anarchy in these wilder lands 
recedes once more before the older anarchy of 
Nature .f^ Or will they be entirely swallowed 
by that ugliness of shops and trousers with 
which we enchain the earth, and become a 
memory and less than a memory .^^ They 
are that already. The Indians have passed. 
They left no arts, no tradition, no buildings 
or roads or laws; only a story or two, and 
a few names, strange and beautiful. The 
ghosts of the old chiefs must surely chuckle 
when they note that the name by which 
Canada has called her capital and the centre 
of her political life, Ottawa, is an Indian 
name which signifies 'buying and selling.' 
And the wanderer in this land will always 



144 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

be remarking an unexplained fragrance 
about the place-names, as from some flower 
which has withered, and which he does not 
know. 



XIII 
THE ROCKIES 



xm 

THE ROCKIES 

At Calgary, if you can spare a minute from 
more important matters, slip beyond the 
hurrying white city, cHmb the goK hnks, and 
gaze west. A low bank of dark clouds dis- 
turbs you by the fixity of its outline. It is 
the Rockies, seventy miles away. On a good 
day, it is said, they are visible twice as far, so 
clear and serene is this air. Five hundred 
miles west is the coast of British Columbia, 
a region with a different cHmate, different 
country, and different problems. It is cut 
off from the prairies by vast tracts of 
wild country and uninhabitable ranges. For 
nearly two hundred miles the train pants 
through the homeless grandeur of the Rockies 
and the Selkirks. Four or five hotels, a few 
huts or tents, and a rare mining-camp — that 
is all the habitation in many thousands of 
square miles. Little even of that is visible 
from the train. That is one of the chief differ- 
ences between the effect of the Rockies and 

147 



148 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

that of the Alps. There, you are always in 
sight of a civilisation which has nestled for 
ages at the feet of those high places. They 
stand, enrobed with worship, and grander by 
contrast with the lives of men. These un- 
memoried heights are inhuman — or rather, 
irrelevant to humanity. No recocrded Hannibal 
has struggled across them; their shadow lies 
on no remembered literature. They acknow- 
ledge claims neither of the soul nor of the 
body of man. He is a stranger, neither 
Nature's enemy nor her child. She is there 
alone, scarcely a unity in the heaped confusion 
of these crags, almost without grandeur among 
the chaos of earth. 

Yet this horrid and solitary wildness is but 
one aspect. There is beauty here, at length, 
for the first time in Canada, the real beauty 
that is always too sudden for mortal eyes, and 
brings pain with its comfort. The Rockies 
have a remoter, yet a kindlier, beauty than 
the Alps. Their rock is of a browner colour, 
and such rugged peaks and crowns as do 
not attain snow continually suggest gigantic 
castellations, or the ramparts of Titans. East- 
ward, the foothills are few and low, and the 
mountains stand superbly. The heart lifts 
to see them. They guard the sunset. Into 



THE ROCKIES 149 

this rocky wilderness you plunge, and toil 
through it hour by hour, viewing it from the 
rear of the Observation-Car. The Observa- 
tion-Car is a great invention of the new world. 
At the end of the train is a compartment with 
large windows, and a little platform behind 
it, roofed over, but exposed otherwise to 
the air. On this platform are sixteen little 
perches, for which you fight with Americans. 
Victorious, you crouch on one, and watch the 
ever-receding panorama behind the train. It 
is an admirable way of viewing scenery. But 
a day of being perpetually drawn backwards 
at a great pace through some of the grandest 
mountains in the world has a queer effect. 
Like Hfe, it leaves you with a dizzy irritation. 
For, as in hfe, you never see the glories till 
they are past, and then they vanish with 
incredible rapidity. And if you crane to see 
the dwindhng further peaks, you miss the new 
splendours. 

The day I went through most of the Rockies 
was, by some standards, a bad one for the 
view. Rain scudded by in forlorn, grey 
showers, and the upper parts of the mountains 
were wrapped in cloud, which was but rarely 
blown aside to reveal the heights. SubHmity, 
therefore, was left to the imagination; but 



150 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

desolation was most vividly present. In no 
weather could the impression of loneliness be 
stronger. The pines drooped and sobbed. 
Cascades, born somewhere in the dun firma- 
ment above, dropped down the mountain 
sides in ever-growing white threads. The 
rivers roared and plunged with aimless passion 
down the ravines. Stray little clouds, left 
behind when the wrack lifted a little, ran 
bleating up and down the forlorn hill-sides. 
More often, the clouds trailed along the valleys, 
a long procession of shrouded, melancholy 
figures, seeming to pause, as with an indeter- 
minate, tragic, vain gesture, before passing 
out of sight up some ravine. 

Yet desolation is not the final impression 
that will remain of the Rockies and the 
Selkirks. I was advised by various people 
to 'stop off' at Banff and at Lake Louise, in 
the Rockies. I did so. They are supposed 
to be equally the beauty spots of the mountains. 
How perplexing it is that advisers are always 
so kindly and willing to help, and always so 
undiscriminating. It is equally disastrous to 
be a sceptic and to be credulous. Banff is an 
ordinary little tourist resort in mountainous 
country, with hills and a stream and snow- 
peaks beyond. Beautiful enough, and in- 



THE ROCKIES 151 

vigorating. But Lake Louise — ^Lake Louise 
is of another world. Imagine a little round 
lake 6000 feet up, a mile across, closed in by 
great clifiFs of brown rock, round the shoulders 
of which are thrown mantles of close dark 
pine. At one end the lake is fed by a vast 
glacier, and its milky tumbling stream; and 
the glacier climbs to snowfields of one of the 
highest and loveliest peaks in the Rockies, 
which keeps perpetual guard over the scene. 
To this place you go up three or four miles 
from the railway. There is the hotel at one 
end of the lake, facing the glacier; else no 
sign of humanity. From the windows you 
may watch the water and the peaks all day, 
and never see the same view twice. In the 
lake, ever-changing, is Beauty herself, as 
nearly visible to mortal eyes as she may ever 
be. The water, beyond the flowers, is green, 
always a different green. Sometimes it is 
tranquil, glassy, shot with blue, of a peacock 
tint. Then a httle wind awakes in the dis- 
tance, and ruffles the surface, yard by yard, 
covering it with a myriad tiny wrinkles, till 
half the lake is milky emerald, while the rest 
still sleeps. And, at length, the whole is 
astir, and the sun catches it, and Lake Louise 
is a web of laughter, the opal distillation of all 



152 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

the buds of all the spring. On either side 
go up the dark processional pines, mounting 
to the sacred peaks, devout, kneeling, motion- 
less, in an ecstasy of homely adoration, like 
the donors and their families in a Flemish 
picture. Among these you may wander for 
hours by little rambling paths, over white 
and red and golden flowers, and, continually, 
you spy little lakes, hidden away, each a shy, 
soft jewel of a new strange tint of green or 
blue, mutable and lovely. . . . And beyond 
all is the glacier and the vast fields and peaks 
of eternal snow. 

If you watch the great white cliff, from the 
foot of which the glacier flows — seven miles 
away, but it seems two — you will sometimes 
see a little puff of silvery smoke go up, thin, 
and vanish. A few seconds later comes the 
roar of terriflc, distant thunder. The moun- 
tains tower and smile unregarding in the sun. 
It was an avalanche. And if you cKmb any 
of the ridges or peaks around, there are dis- 
covered other valleys and heights and ranges, 
wild and desert, stretching endlessly away. 
As day draws to an end the shadows on the 
snow turn bluer, the crying of innumerable 
waters hushes, and the immense, bare ramparts 
of westward-facing rock that guard the great 



THE ROCKIES 153 

valley win a rich, golden-brown radiance. 
Long after the sun has set they seem to give 
forth the splendour of the day, and the tran- 
quillity of their centuries, in undiminished 
fulness. They have that other-worldly 
serenity which a perfect old age possesses. 
And as with a perfect old age, so here, the 
colour and the light ebb so gradually out of 
things that you could swear nothing of the 
radiance and glory gone up to the very moment 
before the dark. 

It was on such a height, and at some such 
hour as this, that I sat and considered the 
nature of the country in this continent. There 
was perceptible, even here, though less urgent 
than elsewhere, the strangeness I had noticed 
in woods by the St Lawrence, and on the 
banks of the Delaware (where are red-haired 
girls who sing at dawn), and in British Colum- 
bia, and afterwards among the brown hills and 
colossal trees of California, but especially by 
that lonely golden beach in Manitoba, where 
the high-stepping little brown deer run down 
to drink, and the wild geese through the 
evening go flying and crying. It is an empty 
land. To love the country here — mountains 
are worshipped, not loved — is like embracing 
a wraith. A European can find nothing to 



154 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

satisfy the hunger of his heart. The air is 
too thin to breathe. He requires haunted 
woods, and the friendly presence of ghosts. 
The immaterial soil of England is heavy and 
fertile with the decaying stuff of past seasons 
and generations. Here is the floor of a new 
wood, yet uncumbered by one year's autumn 
fall. We Europeans find the Orient stale 
and get too luxuriantly fetid by reason of 
the multitude of bygone lives and thoughts, 
oppressive with the crowded presence of the 
dead, both men and gods. So, I imagine, a 
Canadian would feel our woods and fields 
heavy with the past and the invisible, and 
sniffer claustrophobia in an EngHsh country- 
side beneath the dreadful pressure of immortals. 
For his own forests and wild places are wind- 
swept and empty. That is their charm, and 
their terror. You may lie awake all night 
and never feel the passing of evil presences, 
nor hear printless feet; neither do you lapse 
into slumber with the comfortable conscious- 
ness of those friendly watchers who sit in- 
visibly by a lonely sleeper under an English 
sky. Even an Irishman would not see a row 
of little men with green caps lepping along 
beneath the fire-weed and the golden daisies; 
nor have the subtler fairies of England found 



THE ROCKIES 155 

these wilds. It has never paid a steamship 
or railway company to arrange for their 
emigration. 

In the bush of certain islands of the South 
Seas you may hear a crashing on windless 
noons, and, looking up, see a corpse swinging 
along head downwards at a great speed from 
tree to tree, holding by its toes, grimacing, 
dripping with decay. Americans, so active 
in this life, rest quiet afterwards. And 
though every stone of Wall Street have its 
separate Lar, their kind have not gone out 
beyond city-lots. The maple and the birch 
conceal no dryads, and Pan has never been 
heard amongst these reed-beds. Look as long 
as you like upon a cataract of the New World, 
you shall not see a white arm in the foam. A 
godless place. And the dead do not return. 
That is why there is nothing lurking in the 
heart of the shadows, and no human mystery 
in the colours, and neither the same joy nor the 
kind of peace in dawn and sunset that older 
lands know. It is, indeed, a new world. 
How far away seem those grassy, moonlit 
places in England that have been Roman 
camps or roads, where there is always serenity, 
and the spirit of a purpose at rest, and the 
sunUght flashes upon more than flint! Here 



156 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

one is perpetually a first-comer. The land is 
virginal, the wind cleaner than elsewhere, and 
every lake new-born, and each day is the 
first day. The flowers are less conscious than 
.English flowers, the breezes have nothing to 
^remember, and everything to promise. There 
walk, as yet, no ghosts of lovers in Canadian 
lanes. This is the essence of the grey fresh- 
ness and brisk melancholy of this land. And 
for all the charm of those qualities, it is also 
the secret of a European's discontent. For 
it is possible, at a pinch, to do without gods. 
But one misses the dead. 



XIV 

SOME NIGGERS 



XIV 
SOME NIGGERS 

"Look at those niggers 1 Whose are they ?" (An American 
Suffragist lady on board s.s. 'Ventura,' entering Pago-Pago 
Harhour, Samoa, October 1913. Apropos of the Samoans.) 

I SUPPOSE that if news came that the National 
Gallery was burnt down, one might feel, while 
hearing of the general damage, the rooms 
gutted or untouched, the Rembrandts and 
Titians saved, harmed, or lost, a sudden dis- 
proportionately keen little stab of wonder: 
"The Pisanello St George;' or "The Patinir 
Flight into Egypt'' — "What's happened to 
that?" So now there must be a handful 
of wanderers here and there who, among 
all the major conflagration and disasters of 
nations and continents, have felt the tug of 
the question, "What of Samoa?" 

The South Sea Islands have an invincible 
glamour. Any bar in 'Frisco or Sydney will 
give you tales of seamen who slipped ashore 
in Samoa or Tahiti or the Marquesas for a 
month's holiday, five, ten, or twenty years ago. 

159 



160 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

Their wives .and families await them yet. 
They are compound, these islands, of all legend- 
ary heavens. They are Calypso's and Pros- 
pero's isle, and the Hesperides, and Paradise, 
and every timeless and untroubled spot. Such 
tales have been made of them by men who 
have been there, and gone away, and have 
been haunted by the smell of the bush and 
the lagoons, and faint thunder on the distant 
reef, and the colours of sky and sea and coral, 
and the beauty and grace of the islanders. 
And the queer thing is that it's all, almost 
tiresomely, true. In the South Seas the 
Creator seems to have laid Himself out to 
show what He can do. Imagine an island 
with the most perfect climate in the world, 
tropical, yet almost always cooled by a breeze 
from the sea. No malaria or other fevers. 
No dangerous beasts, snakes, or insects. Fish 
for the catching, and fruits for the pluck- 
ing. And an earth and sky and sea of im- 
mortal loveliness. What more could civilisa- 
tion give? Umbrellas? Rope? Gladstone 
bags? . . . Any one of the vast leaves of 
the banana is more waterproof than the most 
expensive woven stuff. And from the first 
tree you can tear off a long strip of fibre that 
holds better than any rope. And thirty 



SOME NIGGERS 161 

seconds' work on a^great palm leaf produces 
a basket-bag which will carry incredible 
weights all day, and can be thrown away in 
the evening. A world of conveniences. And 
the things which civilisation has left behind 
or missed by the way are there, too, among 
the Polynesians: beauty and courtesy and 
mirth. I think there is no gift of mind or 
body that the wise value which these people 
lack. A man I met in some other islands, 
who had travelled much all over the world, 
said to me, ''I have found no man, in or out 
of Europe, with the good manners and dignity 
of the Samoan, with the possible exception of 
the Irish peasant." A people among whom 
an Italian would be uncouth, and a high-caste 
Hindu vulgar, and Karsavina would seem 
clumsy, and Helen of Troy a frump. 

The white population of Heaven, as one 
would expect, is very small; but, as one 
wouldn't expect, it is composed of Americans, 
English, and Germans. About half Germans, 
for it has been a German colony for some 
fourteen years. But it is one of the few white 
'possessions,' I suppose, where a decent white 
needn't feel ashamed of himseK. For, though 
it's proper to deny that Germans can colonise, 
they have certainly ruled Samoa very well. 



162 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

In some part, no doubt, the luck has been 
with them — with the world — in this success. 
Samoa was one of their later and wiser attempts 
in colonising. The first governor was Herr 
Solf, the present Secretary for the Colonies, 
who is reputed to have started the administra- 
tion of Samoa after a careful examination of 
our method of ruling Fiji, and with a due, but 
not complete, regard for the advice of the 
chief English and American settlers in Samoa. 
Certainly he started it very ably and wisely. 
By luck and good management those various 
forces which might destroy the beauty of 
Samoa are almost ineffectual. The fact that 
the missionaries are nearly all English puts a 
slight sufficient chasm between the spiritual 
and civil powers, and avoids that worst peril 
of these places — ^hierocracy. The trade of the 
islands is largely a monopoly of the 'Ger- 
man firm,' a big affair which pays a few 
people in Hamburg fabulous percentages. So 
smaller traders aren't encouraged to flourish 
unduly; and the German firm itself is too well 
fed to bother about extending. The Samoans, 
therefore, aren't exploited, spiritually or com- 
mercially, as much as they might be. By such 
slight chances beauty keeps a foothold in 
the world. The missionary's peace of mind 



SOME NIGGERS 163 

may require that the Samoan should wear 
trousers, or the trader's pocket that he should 
drink gin and live under corrugated iron. 
But the Government has discovered that these 
things are not good for the health of the Poly- 
nesian, so the Samoan wears his lava-lava and 
drinks his hava, and lives in his cool and lovely 
thatched hut, and is happy. And — final test 
of administration — the population is no longer 
decreasing. 

But I think there's more than luck or German 
wisdom at the bottom of the happy condition 
of Samoa. Something in the very magic of 
the place seems to subdue or soften the evil 
in men. Heaven forbid I should deny that 
mean and treacherous and cruel acts of white 
men and brown are on record. But as a rule 
the greedy or the boorish, once they settle 
there, appear to mellow and grow quiet. 
Between this sea and sky even a trader be- 
comes almost a gentleman, even a Prussian 
almost lovable, and the very missionaries are 
betrayed by beauty, and contentment takes 
them unaware. 

Samoa has been well governed. The people 
have been forbidden a few perils of civilisation, 
and for the rest are left pretty well to them- 
selves. Go up from Apia across the mountains. 



164 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

or round the coast, or take a boat over to the 
other big island, Savaii, and you find them 
Hving their old life, fishing and bathing and 
singing, and never a sign of a white man. 
They are guaranteed possession of their 
land. They'll sometimes complain faintly of 
'taxation' — a small head-tax the Government 
exacts, which compels the individual to some 
four or five days' work a year. The English 
inhabitants themselves have had no grumble 
against the Germans except that they incline 
to be 'too kind to the natives' — an admirable 
testimonial. And traders in the Pacific say 
they always get far better treatment from 
the customs and harbour authorities at Apia 
than at the British Suva, in Fiji. 

And yet the Samoans do not like the 
Germans. When I was there, nearly a year 
ago, I was often asked, ''When will Peritania 
(Britain) fight Germany, and send her away 
from Samoa .^" They have no complaint 
against the Germans. They have merely a 
sentimental and highly flattering preference 
for the English. On a recent visit of an 
English gunboat to Apia, the officers were 
entertained at a Samoan dinner party, with 
music and dances, by an eminent and very 
charming young princess. The princess is a 



SOME NIGGERS 165 

famous beauty, with the keen inteUigence 
Samoans have if they care, a wonderful 
dancer, possessed of a glorious singing voice 
and a perfect knowledge of English. The 
party was a great success. The princess led 
her guests afterwards to the flag-staff. Before 
anyone could stop her, she leapt on to the 
pole and raced up the sixty feet of it. That 
also is among the accomplishments of a 
Samoan princess. She seized the German 
flag, tore it to pieces, brought it down, and 
danced on it. So the tale is; and it is prob- 
ably true. In the villages where I stayed 
it was amusing how swiftly and completely 
the children forgot the few words of German 
the Government sometimes had them taught; 
while one or two common phrases, 'M or gen/ 
'gut,' etc., were retained as extremely good 
jokes by the boys and girls, occasions of in- 
extinguishable laughter, through the absurdity 
of their sound and the very ridiculous German- 
ness of them. . . . 

I wish I were there again. It is a country, 
and a life, that bind the heart. There is a 
poem: 

"I know an island. 
Lovely and lost, and half the world away; 
And there, 'twixt lowland and highland. 



166 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

Lies a pool, rich with murmur and scent and glimmer. 

And there my friends go all the radiant day. 

Each golden-limbed and flower-crowned laughing swimmer," 

— and so on. It tells how ugly and joyless by 
comparison the fellow's own country some- 
times seems, filled with money-making and 
fogs and such grey things: 

"Evil and gloom, and cold o' nights in my land; 
But, — I know an island 
Where Beauty and Courtesy, as flowers, blow." 

So it goes, with a jolly return on the rhyme. 
But the whole poem is a bad one. Still, the 
man felt it, the magic. It is a magic of a 
different way of life. In the South Seas, if 
you live the South Sea life, the intellect soon 
lapses into quiescence. The body becomes 
more active, the senses and perceptions more 
lordly and acute. It is a life of swimming 
and climbing and resting after exertion. The 
skin seems to grow more sensitive to light 
and air, and the feel of water and the earth 
and leaves. Hour after hour one may float 
in the warm lagoons, conscious, in the whole 
body, of every shred and current of the multi- 
tudinous water, or diving under in a vain 
attempt to catch the radiant butterfly-coloured 
fish that flit in and out of the thousand windows 



SOME NIGGERS 167 

of their gorgeous coral palaces. Or go up, 
one of a singing flower-garlanded crowd, to a 
shaded pool of a river in the bush, cool from 
the mountains. The blossom-hung darkness 
is streaked with the bodies that fling them- 
selves, head or feet first, from the cliffs around 
the water, and the haunted forest-silence is 
broken by laughter. It is part of the charm 
of these people that, while they are not so 
fooHsh as to 'think,' their intelligence is 
incredibly Uvely and subtle, their sense of 
humour and their intuitions of other people's 
feeUngs are very keen and living. They have 
built up, in the long centuries of their civilisa- 
tion, a delicate and noble complexity of be- 
haviour and of personal relationships. A 
white man living with them soon feels his 
mind as deplorably dull as his skin is pale and 
unhealthy among those glorious golden-brown 
bodies. But even he soon learns to be his 
body (and so his true mind), instead of using 
it as a stupid convenience for his personality, 
a moment's umbrella against this world. He 
is perpetually and intensely aware of the 
subtleties of taste in food, of every tint and 
line of the incomparable glories of those 
dawns and evenings, of each shade of inter- 
course in fishing or swimming or dancing with 



168 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

the best companions in the world. That 
alone is life; all else is death. And after 
dark, the black palms against a tropic night, 
the smell of the wind, the tangible moonlight 
like a white, dry, translucent mist, the lights 
in the huts, the murmur and laughter of 
passing figures, the passionate, queer thrill of 
the rhythm of some hidden dance — all this 
will seem to him, inexplicably and almost 
unbearably, a scene his heart has known long 
ago, and forgotten, and yet always looked for. 
And now Samoa is ours. A New Zealand 
Expeditionary Force took it. Well, I know 
a princess who will have had the day of her 
hfe. Did they see Stevenson's tomb gleaming 
high up on the hill, as they made for that 
passage in the reef.^ Did Vasa, with his 
heavy-lidded eyes, and that infinitely adorable 
lady Fafaia, wander down to the beach to 
watch them land.^^ They must have landed 
from boats; and at noon, I see. How hot 
they got! I know that Apia noon. Didn't 
they rush to the Tivoli bar — ^but I forget. 
New Zealanders are teetotalers. So, perhaps, 
the Samoans gave them the coolest of all 
drinks, kava; and they scored. And what 
dances in their honour, that night! — but, 
again, I'm afraid the houla-houla would shock 



SOME NIGGERS 169 

a New Zealander. I suppose they left a 
garrison, and went away. I can very vividly 
see them steaming out in the evening; and 
the crowd on shore would be singing them that 
sweetest and best-known of South Sea songs, 
which begins 'Good-bye, my Flenni' ('Friend,' 
you'd pronounce it), and goes on in Samoan, 
a very beautiful tongue. I hope they'll rule 
Samoa well. 



XV 
AN UNUSUAL YOUNG MAN 



XV 

AN UNUSUAL YOUNG MAN 

Some say the Declaration of War threw us 
into a primitive abyss of hatred and the lust 
for blood. Others declare that we behaved 
very well. I do not know. I only know the 
thoughts that flowed through the mind of a 
friend of mine when he heard the news. My 
friend — I shall make no endeavour to excuse 
him — is a normal, even ordinary man, wholly 
English, twenty-four years old, active and 
given to music. By a chance he was ignorant 
of the events of the world during the last 
days of July. He was camping with some 
friends in a remote part of Cornwall, and had 
gone on, with a companion, for a four-days' 
sail. So it wasn't till they beached her again 
that they heard. A youth ran down to them 
with a telegram : " We're at war with Germany. 
We've joined France and Russia." 

My friend ate and drank, and then climbed 
a hill of gorse, and sat alone, looking at the 
sea. His mind was full of confused images, 

173 



174 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

and the sense of strain. In answer to the 
word 'Germany/ a train of vague thoughts 
dragged across his brain. The pompous 
middle-class vulgarity of the building of Berlin; 
the wide and restful beauty of Munich; the 
taste of beer; innumerable quiet, glittering 
cajes\ the Bing'^ the swish of evening air 
in the face, as one skis down past the pines; 
a certain angle of the eyes in the face; long 
nights of drinking, and singing, and laughter; 
the admirable beauty of German wives and 
mothers; certain friends; some tunes; the 
quiet length of evening over the Starnberger- 
See. Between him and the Cornish sea he 
saw quite clearly an April morning on a lake 
south of Berlin, the grey water slipping past 
his little boat, and a peasant-woman, sud- 
denly revealed against apple-blossom, hang- 
ing up blue and scarlet garments to dry in 
the sun. Children played about her; and she 
sang as she worked. And he remembered a 
night in Munich spent with a students' Kneipe. 
From eight to one they had continually 
emptied immense jugs of beer, and smoked, 
and sung English and German songs in pro- 
found chorus. And when the party broke 
up he found himself arm-in-arm with the 
president, who was a vast Jew, and with an 



AN UNUSUAL YOUNG MAN 175 

Apollonian youth called Leo Diringer, who 
said he was a poet. There was also a fourth 
man, of whom he could remember no detail. 
Together, walking with ferocious care down 
the middle of the street, they had swayed 
through Schwabing seeking an open cajL 
Cafe Benz was closed, but further up there 
was a little place still lighted, inhabited by 
one waiter, innumerable chairs and tables 
piled on each other for the night, and a row 
of chess-boards, in front of which sat a little 
bald, bearded man in dress clothes, waiting. 
The little man seemed to them infinitely 
pathetic. Four against one, they played him 
at chess, and were beaten. They bowed, 
and passed into the night. Leo Diringer 
recited a sonnet, and slept suddenly at the 
foot of a lamp-post. The Jew's heavy-lidded 
eyes shone with a final flicker of caution, and 
he turned homeward resolutely, to the last 
not wholly drunk. My friend had wandered 
to his lodgings, in an infinite peace. He could 
not remember what had happened to the 
fourth man. . . . 

A thousand little figures tumbled through 
his mind. But they no longer brought with 
them that air of comfortable kindliness which 
Germany had always signified for him. Some- 



176 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

thing in him kept uj-ging, "You must hate 
these things, find evil in them." There was 
that half -conscious agony of breaking a mental 
habit, painting out a mass of associations, 
which he had felt in ceasing to believe in a 
religion, or, more acutely, after quarrelling 
with a friend. He knew that was absurd. 
The picture came to him of encountering the 
Jew, or Diringer, or old Wolf, or little Streck- 
mann, the pianist, in a raid on the East Coast, 
or on the Continent, slashing at them in a 
stagey, dimly-imagined battle. Ridiculous. 
He vaguely imagined a series of heroic feats, 
vast enterprise, and the applause of crowds. . . . 
From that egotism he was awakened to a 
different one, by the thought that this day 
meant war and the change of all things he 
knew. He realised, with increasing resent- 
ment, that music would be neglected. And 
he wouldn't be able, for example, to camp out. 
He might have to volunteer for military 
training and service. Some of his friends 
would be killed. The Russian ballet wouldn't 

return. His own relationship with A , a 

girl he intermittently adored, would be 
changed. Absurd, but inevitable; because 
— he scarcely worded it to himself — ^he and she 
and everyone else were going to be different. 



AN UNUSUAL YOUNG MAN 177 

His mind fluttered irascibly to escape from 
this thought, but still came back to it, like a 
tethered bird. Then he became calmer, and 
wandered out for a time into fantasy. 

A cloud over the sun woke him to conscious- 
ness of his own thoughts; and he found, with 
perplexity, that they were continually recur- 
ring to two periods of his life, the days after 
the death of his mother, and the time of his 
first deep estrangement from one he loved. 
After a bit he understood this. Now, as 
then, his mind had been completely divided 
into two parts: the upper running about 
aimlessly from one half-relevant thought to 
another, the lower unconscious half labouring 
with some profound and unknowable change. 
This feeling of ignorant helplessness linked 
him with those past crises. His consciousness 
was like the light scurry of waves at full tide, 
when the deeper waters are pausing and 
gathering and turning home. Something was 
growing in his heart, and he couldn't tell 
what. But as he thought 'England and 
Germany,' the word 'England' seemed to 
flash like a line of foam. With a sudden 
tightening of his heart, he realised that there 
might be a raid on the English coast. He 
didn't imagine any possibility of it succeeding^ 



178 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

but only of enemies and warfare on English 
soil. The idea sickened him. He was im- 
mensely surprised to perceive that the actual 
earth of England held for him a quality which 

he found in A , and in a friend's honour, 

and scarcely anywhere else, a quality which, 
if he'd ever been sentimental enough to use 
the word, he'd have called 'holiness.' His 
astonishment grew as the full flood of 
'England' swept him on from thought to 
thought. He felt the triumphant helplessness 
of a lover. Grey, uneven little fields, and 
small, ancient hedges rushed before him, wild 
flowers, elms and beeches, gentleness, sedate 
houses of red brick, proudly unassuming, a 
countryside of rambling hills and friendly 
copses. He seemed to be raised high, looking 
down on a landscape compounded of the 
western view from the Cotswolds, and the 
Weald, and the high land in Wiltshire, and 
the Midlands seen from the hills above Prince's 
Risborough. And all this to the accompani- 
ment of tunes heard long ago, an intolerable 
number of them being hymns. There was, 
in his mind, a confused multitude of faces, 
to most of which he could not put a name. 
At one moment he was on an Atlantic liner, 
sick for home, making Plymouth at nightfall; 



AN UNUSUAL YOUNG MAN 179 

and at another, diving into a little rocky pool 
through which the Teign flows, north of Bovey; 
and again, waking, stiff with dew, to see the 
dawn come up over the Royston plain. And 
continually he seemed to see the set of a 
mouth which he knew for his mother's, and 

A 's face, and, inexplicably, the face of an 

old man he had once passed in a Warwick- 
shire village. To his great disgust, the most 
commonplace sentiments found utterance in 
him. At the same time he was extraordinarily 
happy. . . . 

My friend, who has always, though never 
very passionately, believed himseK a most 
unusual young man, rose to his feet. Feeling 
a little frightened, and more than a little 
unwell — for he is a person of quiet mental 
habits — he wandered down the hill. He kept 
slowly moving his head, like a man who wishes 
to dodge a pain. I gather that he was 
conscious of few definite thoughts till he 
reached the London train. He kept remem- 
bering, unwillingly, a midnight in Carnival- 
time in Munich, when he had seen a clown, 
a Pierrot, and a Columbine tip-toe deli- 
cately round the deserted corner of Theresien- 
strasse, and vanish into the darkness. Then 
he thought of the lights on the pavement in 



180 LETTERS FROM AMERICA 

Trafalgar Square. It seemed to him the 
most desirable thing in the world to mingle 
and talk with a great many English people. 
Also, he kept saying to himself — for he felt 
vaguely jealous of the young men in Germany 
and France — "Well, if Armageddon's on, I 
suppose one should be there." ... Of France, 
he tells me, he thought little. The French 
always seemed to him people to be respected, 
but very remote; more incomprehensible than 
the Japanese, more, even, than the Irish. Of 
Russia, less. She meant nothing to him 
except a sense of hysteria and vague evil 
which he had been given by some of her 
music and literature. He thought often and 
heavily of Germany. Of England, all the 
time. He didn't know whether he was glad 
or sad. It was a new feeling. 



3 

p. li. 117 



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